Literary Politics, Partisanship, and Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

This essay examines how Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque demonstrates the ways in which he accrued different types of capital in order to leverage his position within the US literary market. Transposing Leon Jackson's analysis of Thomas White's success as the proprietor of the Southern Literary Messenger to Poe's first book-length publication, I explain how the Advertisements section prefacing the second volume reflects his methodical strategy for soliciting and collecting positive reviews from influential literary figures for use at a later, favorable time.