In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Poe Studies Association Updates

From Paul Lewis, PSA President

Dr. J. Lasley Dameron—one of the founding members of the PSA and honorary member of the PSA since 1988—passed away at the age of ninety on June 27, 2016, in Memphis, Tennessee. His obituary is included in this issue.

As a tribute to Professor Dameron and at the urging of Richard Kopley, the Executive Committee voted to create a third award, named in honor of Dr. Dameron. This award will be given to an editor or editors of an excellent Poe essay collection or a compiler or compilers of an excellent Poe bibliography in a given year. The J. Lasley Dameron Award will complement the Patrick F. Quinn Award, given to the authors of the best monographs on Poe, and the James W. Gargano Award, given to the authors of the best articles on Poe.

On a related matter, at the PSA business meeting in late May, Carole Shaffer-Koros reported that the Quinn Award Fund, having declined gradually over the years, needed to be restored. Fortunately, this year the PSA began to receive royalties from Penn State Press for the Edgar Allan Poe Review. After some consideration, the Executive Committee voted to use royalties earned over the next three years to restore the Quinn Fund.

Looking ahead, the Program Committee for the 2018 International Poe and Hawthorne Conference in Kyoto, Japan, has issued a call for papers found on the back cover of this issue. It is not too early to think about the research you’d like to share.

From Amy Branam Armiento, PSA Vice President

On Saturday, January 7, 2017, the Poe Studies Association will hold its session at the annual MLA convention in Philadelphia. For more details on this session, please see “Abstracts for the PSA Panel at MLA 2017” in this issue.

From Emron Esplin, PSA Member-at-Large

At the upcoming ALA Conference in Boston (May 25–28, 2017), one of the Poe Studies Association’s panels will focus on Poe in light of anthologies. Earning a living as a professional writer for newspapers and magazines, Poe was constantly occupied with publishing enterprises, and he had his own ideas about anthologizing others (the monumental The Living Writers of America) as well as himself (Tales of the Folio Club, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, The Raven and Other Poems). Poe was obsessed with displaying both unity and [End Page 236] diversity in his body of work, and that literary corpus was both dismantled and reconstructed during his lifetime and afterward by several influential editors. According to Alan C. Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, Poe was hardly ranked in the most influential poetry anthologies of his time, but his tales appeared regularly in gift books, newspaper yearbooks, and the like. He arguably, and somewhat ironically, secured his polemic afterlife by trusting Rufus W. Griswold, one of the few who acknowledged his merits from the very first edition of The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842, with the post-humous compilation of his writings.

Internationally, figures like John Henry Ingram, Charles Baudelaire, and Jorge Luis Borges all created distinct Poe canons, influencing readerships in different directions. To this day, Poe remains a favorite in certain genre or thematic anthologies—horror stories, detective fiction, science fiction, Gothic narratives, tales of mystery and madness, stories about death and dementia— while new combinations and selections of his works (fugitive writings, humorous tales, hoaxes, parodies) market his image in revisionist ways. This panel is interested in papers that wrestle with how Poe’s texts have been collected and anthologized in various literary traditions in both English and translation, and we hope the panel will create a dialogue between different approaches to the subject, including context-oriented, historicist, world or global literature– based, and translation-minded scholarship.

This panel has been designed by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato of the University of Lisbon, and it will be chaired by Emron Esplin. Please send questions or queries to emron_esplin@byu.edu. Submissions should also be sent to emron_esplin@byu.edu by January 15, 2017, with a subject line “PSA Panel 2017.”

From Carole...

pdf

Share