From The Editor

With this issue we begin our second year with Penn State University Press, and we are very pleased with the production quality, Nicholas Taylor’s copy-editing, and the way Editorial Manager makes every step in the process more efficient. We are grateful to the staff at the press, especially Diana Pesek, Journals Manager; Astrid Meyer, Journals Managing Editor; and Julie Lambert, Production Coordinator. Our submissions have increased, and, as a result, we have expanded our editorial board to include sixteen instead of twelve members to avoid overburdening our readers. We would like to welcome the following new members of the editorial board for a four-year term: Mary De Jong, Penn State University; Alexander Hammond, Washington State University; Scott Peeples, College of Charleston; and Brett Zimmerman, York University.

This issue includes four essays—by Elina Absalyamova, Jerome McGann, Stephen Rachman, and Alexandra Urakova—first presented as papers at the “Positively Poe Conference” held in mid-June 2013 at University of Virginia and sponsored by the Richmond Poe Museum and UVA’s Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library. The conference was cochaired by Hal Poe and Alexandra Urakova. According to Hal Poe, the conference papers were to highlight the positive side of Edgar’s life and work: “Poe’s reputation as a tortured, tragic figure, melancholic poet and the ‘master of the macabre’ has fueled his popularity for over a century and a half . . . beyond the debunking of the popular caricature, we would like to discover the ‘positive’ side of Poe’s life and work. Just as his life had its ups and downs, his writing, too, reflects a wide range of experience, not exclusively the dark and dismal.” Having participated in this conference, I would say that that objective was gratifyingly met. The keynote speaker, Ben Fisher, entertained us in the historic Rotunda Room with an after-dinner talk that included engaging anecdotes of his friendships with prominent Poe scholars. The next night we picnicked in the Ragged Mountains at Ben Warthen’s mountaintop home overlooking Charlottesville. All in all, it was a “positively” stimulating conference.

Fig. 1.

Hal Poe, cochair of the Positively Poe Conference at UVA.

Just in time for Poe’s 205th birthday, the full text a number of books became available at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website (http://www.eapoe.org/), thanks to the hard work of Jeffrey Savoye:

• • The full text of John Carl Miller's 1977 Building Poe Biography is now available at http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/jcmbpb00.htm

• • The full text of Hervey Allen’s 1927 biography Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (2 vols.) is available: vol. 1: http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/hva26100.htm; vol. 2: http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/hva26200.htm

• • Susan A. T. Weiss’s Home Life of Poe (1907), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1900/hlfpinfo.htm

• • Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies (1978), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19781.htm

• • Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19861.htm

• • Masques, Mysteries, and Mastodons: A Poe Miscellany (2006), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb20061.htm

Plans for the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference are underway, and Richard Kopley and I, as cochairs, have begun fund-raising, successfully receiving grants from Penn States English Department, College of Liberal Arts, Office of the Vice President for Commonwealth Colleges, Office of the Vice President for Research, and Penn State Lehigh Valley’s Continuing Education Department; Sewanee: The University of the South; Middle Tennesee State University’s Honors College, College of Graduate Studies and College of Liberal Arts; http://www.mtsu.edu/liberalarts/, Shoko Itoh, and Kean University. We continue to receive generous support from Susan Tane, who, again, will sponsor the Tane Travel Grants for international participants and students. We welcome all donations to help support conference; please contact Barbara Cantalupo at bac7@psu.edu if you or your institution are interested in contributing. Details regarding the conference are available at the conference website at http://www.poestudies.org/ under the...