A Critical Congeries: Forty-Five Theses for Poe

Given the sheer size of J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples's The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, which includes forty-five essays, numbers over 800 pages, and covers an impressively vast amount of scholarly terrain, it seems nearly impossible for any scholar (certainly for this one) to give a comprehensive assessment of its contributions. The text covers an impressive array of topics: Poe and print culture, neuroscience, affect theory, systems theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, modernism and postmodernism, gender studies and queer theory, salon culture, genre studies, Poe's influences, global Poe, Poe as Americanist, and so on and so on. I can think of only a handful of scholars whose knowledge of Poe scholarship is both broad and deep enough to assess the work in its totality, and most of them have essays within the text and therefore would undoubtedly demure from reviewing the book. I do not envy the editor forced to find a reviewer under such circumstances, and when I first saw the tome, I admit to having chuckled a bit macabrely at the thought of Jana Argersinger and Emron Esplin casting about fruitlessly to find a reviewer for the work—until the phone rang in early May. It was my own perverse impishness, overriding my better judgment and my awareness that I was decidedly not a master of all of the various corners of Poe scholarship, that drove me to accept the invitation. If this review exposes my various ignorances to public view, consider such an exposé an homage to Poe, and take perverse pleasure in seeing the guilty make public his crimes when there was no compelling reason for him to do so. That, if nothing else, should make reading what follows worthwhile.

As with most of Oxford's recent handbooks, this particular text seeks to serve the function of orienting scholars who may be new to Poe scholarship as well as pushing the boundaries of the field by marking the emergent terrain. This text succeeds admirably in accomplishing both tasks. Essays by James M. Hutchisson ("An Orphan's Life: 1809–1831") and Scott Peeples ("A Life in Print: 1831–1849"), found immediately following Kennedy and Peeples's introductory essay (which I will return to shortly), have little to say that is new or groundbreaking, but together they do a commendable job of recounting the fundamentals of Poe's biography—laying bare not only the well-known traumas and trials that marked his life's experience (Hutchisson's focus), but also how the story of his life is, in many ways, the story of emergent print culture in the antebellum United States (Peeples's emphasis). It is easy to imagine assigning such essays to undergraduate and graduate students embarking on the study of Poe for the first time as a brief but insightful introduction to his life and his work, and both pieces will undoubtedly be appreciated as such. It should also be mentioned that each of these essays, like all in the book, include not only the standard works cited but a helpful bibliography of further reading which will prove invaluable to those seeking a deeper dive into the subject matter at hand.

Hutchisson's and Peeples's essays are themselves problematized nicely by the two chapters that follow, "Poe: A Life in Letters" by Lesley Ginsberg and "Poe's Lives" by Richard Kopley. Ginsberg's essay reminds us that for all the emphasis on Poe's situatedness in an emergent print culture, a concomitant manuscript culture was still very much alive and was an integral aspect of Poe's life experience and his work as a writer. In her words, it is important to recall that "a life of letters" for the nineteenth-century writer was always also "a life in letters," and thus it behooves us to remember that the conventions and social networks associated with a culture of letter writing are just as integral to Poe's work as those associated with...