A Poe Potpourri

R # h S 99 authors and of the cost to both authors and critics of judging writing produced under different conditions accordingto literarynationaliststandards. W e need to reexamine the assumptions about literary value that enable Hawthorne’snarrative investments in humiliation t o be redeemed by his humility,the reduction in our field of vision that enables us to ignore the dead judge in the house offiction.[268-69] If in calling our attention to the “deadjudge in the house of fiction”McGill herself indulgesin a classic scholarly trade+ff between the desire to humiliateand the assumptionof humility,s obe it. It worked for Hawthorne,after all. Jonathan Elmer Indiana Uniumity A Poe Potpourri HermannJosef Schnackertz,ed. POEticEfft and CulturalDiscou7ses.Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. xiv, 247 pp. EUR 38.00 cloth. The essays collected in this volume are, with the exception of the article written by the editor of the book,revisedversionsof the paperspresented at an international symposium held on the occasion of the sesquicentennialof Poe’s death at the Catholic University of Eichsdtt-Ingolstadt, Germany (12-14 September 1999). The main theme of the symposiumwas the relation of Poe’s writings to various forms of cultural discourse. “The investigationof philosophical,scientificaswell as other cultural implicationsof Poe’s work. ..was a l s oconcernedwith the questionof howacultural reading of his literaryfictionscan take their characteras ‘talesof effect’intoaccount”[ix],an issue reflected in the title of the book. The scope covered by the various essays is quite wide; it ranges from the culturalsignificanceof animalrepresentations and Poe’s interest in mesmerism and scientific cosmologiesto the explorationof temperance rhetoric in “TheBlack Cat”and the engagement of the public-privatedichotomy in “ThePit and the Pendulum.” Two contributionsdeal with the intercultural and intermedialrepercussionsof Poe’swork. One of these, Christian Drost’s “IlluminatingHelen: SomeI l l u s t r a t i o n sfor Poe’sEarlyPoem ‘ToHelen’ asTransformationsof the Text,”is particularly interesting ;it aims at providinguasurvey of the pictorialtransformation ”of one of Poe’smostfamous poems “asan exampleof the graphicresponse to theauthor’sworks” [33].Although“ToHelen”has “attracted,”in the editor’swords,“fewillustrations sinceitsfirstpublicationin 1831,Drostarguesthat a closer look at them turns out to be illuminating ”: “the scarce twenty pictures produced since 1869showa representativecrosscutof the history of Poeillustrationand thus [reveal]the enormous impactof the author’sliteraryworks on visual artists .” After analyzing the imagery of the poem, “Drostexaminesthe various ways in which the illustrators ’differentapproachesmanage to translate the text’swide range of interpretive possibilities in graphic terms” [ix-x]. He selects four visualimagesof Helenfor t h i spurpose,startingwith thatbyJohn L a m n (1869),whotransmutesPoe’s personification of classical and transcendental beautyinto theVictorianideal of ayoungwoman. Edmund Dulac’s 1909picture of Helen is suggestive as a visualization of Poe’s aesthetics,whereas Jacob Landau’s of 1953 completely neglects the classical background and transforms the figure’s beautyintoa contemporaryfilm-starideal.Finally, Richard Sardinha’s Helen of 1987 evokes an allegedor reconstructedbiographicalcontext (Poe’s romancewith SarahHelenWhitman),withoutattention to the symbolicimplicationsof the figure. In conclusion,Droststressesthat the comparative discussionof text and illustrationsshowsthe illustrators ’ “power to modify the perception of the text, ” while promoting at the same time “readings which neither picture nor text would have stimulatedon their own” 146471. The influence of Poe’s writings on Russian Symbolismis the subjectof Vera Shamina’sarticle “EdgarAllan Poe and Russian Writers o fthe ‘Sixver Age.”’ Shamina rightly claims that it is “difficult to overestimate Poe’s impact on Russian literature . The peak of the writer’s popularity and 100 Poe StudiedDark Romanticism the “climaxof his fame in Russia”occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, the period in Russianculture called the ‘SilverAge” [1771.Shamina points out that “themood, the generalworld outlook of Edgar Poe aswell as his philosophicaland aesthetic positions were very much in tune with the spirit of the SilverAge” [1881-positions the first section of the essay laysout. The mostfamous Russian Symbolists influenced by Poe that Shamina discussesare the poets KonstantinBal’mont and Valeri Brusov. Poe’s influence on the prose writers of the SilverAge is no lessimportant; however ,because the subject has alreadybeen investigated byJoan Delaney Grossman in her comprehensivestudyEdgarAllan Poe in Russia-A Study in kgend and LiteraryInfluence [Wiirzburg:Jal-Verlag, 19731, Shamina limits herself to Poe...