A Global Sickness: Medical Science and Print Culture in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

This article reconsiders The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in light of historical debates about both the rise of circum-Atlantic print culture and the problem of maritime disease. I argue that Poe invoked existing discourses about global disease in order to imagine print as a contagion in its own right and to address his growing anxieties about the changing literary landscape. In so doing, Poe anticipates later controversies about cheap print, textual overproduction, and unauthorized transatlantic reprinting, and exploits the tropes of maritime adventure fiction in order to comment on what he sees as a print culture in crisis.