A New Genre of Poe Collection: Between Encyclopedia and Study

Reading Poe through the cultural contexts of his time is an ongoing strain in contemporary Poe studies, and this alone makes the appearance of Edgar Allan Poe in Context both inevitable and timely. The fruit of collective scholarly efforts in re-contextualizing and remapping Poe over the past two decades, this book, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, stands out from recent publications on Poe thanks to its structure. The 400-page volume is something in between an essay collection and a Poe encyclopedia organized, as a florilegium, in clusters of related subjects: “Geographical Contexts,” “Social Contexts,” “The Contexts of Publishing,” “Literary Contexts,” and “Scientific and Pseudoscientific Contexts” comprise the book’s five sections. Each section consists of six to eight short chapters titled in the style of encyclopedia entries, such as “Great Britain,” “France,” or “The Sea” in the first section; “The Urban Environment,” “Slavery and Abolitionism,” or “The Cult of Mourning” in the second; and so on. As Hayes justly observes in the preface, while “Poe’s writings have been studied in relation to economy, photography, phrenology, and many other cultural, historical, and intellectual phenomena, … no one has attempted to systematically situate Poe in the contexts of his time” [xv]. The structure not only makes the book original and engaging but also enhances its practical value; like Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry [ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Tony Magistrale (New York: MLA, 2008)], Edgar Allan Poe in Context, with its “Further Reading” section instead of “Bibliography” at the back, can serve as a guide for teachers and students of Poe.

Another thing that makes the volume different is the editor’s willingness to collaborate with authors from outside the Poe studies circle. Hayes states: “Though some of the contributors are Poe specialists, many are not. Instead, I have selected contributors for their expertise regarding the individual contexts, thus bringing fresh perspectives to the study of Poe” [xv]. Hayes follows the path of editors like Grail Marcus and Werner Sollors, who, by inviting not only academics but also unaffiliated writers to contribute to A New Literary History of America, favored the “vantage point not of a specialist but of an enthusiast, a skeptic, a digger, a reader, a listener, a viewer” [(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 2009), xxvi]. Although contributors to Edgar Allan Poe in Context are all academics, with the exception of Alvin Holm, a professional architect and restorationist, the small number of Poe specialists creates a similar effect of enthusiasm and exploration. By reading “individual contexts” into Poe, many of these authors discover him anew.

Yet oddly enough, some contributors appear to be experts neither in Poe nor in the subjects they examine. In particular cases, this leads to regrettable omissions in bibliography. To name just a few: In the chapter on gift books, we do not find Meredith McGill’s otherwise much-cited American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], an essential reference in any study of the subject. And the chapter on Poe and Dickens curiously overlooks Stephen Rachman’s essay “‘Es lässt sich nicht schreiben’: Plagiarism and ‘The Man of the Crowd’” [in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995)], which detects Poe’s borrowings from Dickens—though the essay is referenced in the chapter on Great Britain. Such omissions are alarming if we think of the book in pedagogical terms, that is, as a manual for studying or teaching Poe. At the same time, it would be a mistake to regard Edgar Allan Poe in Context as a reference work only. Although Hayes himself claims that the chapters provide, “not … in-depth critical explications of his [Poe’s] writings,” but instead “general overview[s]” of their subjects “us[ing] whatever pertinent Poe writings—verse, fiction, reviews, essays—to suit” [xv], this is not always the case. Rather, we would speak of two types of...