Putting Poe in Place

Poe and Place is a worthy successor and complement to recent books such as Lois Davis Vines's edited volume Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (1999), a survey of the author's influence on literary traditions around the world; Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato's co-edited volume Translated Poe (2014), a comprehensive study of his translation into other languages and literatures; and J. W. Ocker's Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe (2015), a travelogue that tells Poe's own story "geographically and experientially" [(Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 2015), 12]. As one of the latest volumes in Palgrave's series on Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, Poe and Place explores the very notion of "place" in his life and work. This context is wonderfully appropriate for Poe the magazinist, hoaxer, armchair traveler, science writer, and visionary, with his penchant for imagining remarkable settings from "The City in the Sea" to "Landor's Cottage."

One of the great strengths of Poe and Place is its thoughtful organization, stemming from a 2014 lecture and a 2015 symposium at Middle Tennessee State University, where seven of the contributors first presented their ideas on the subject. As Philip Edward Phillips explains, the volume has "a deliberately chiastic design" [xiv]. It opens with prefatory material that succinctly introduces and interrogates the idea of place in philosophy, biography, literary criticism, and geohumanities more broadly, followed by Charles Cantalupo's complex, vibrant poem "Poe in Richmond." The fifteen chapters are grouped by theme. The volume first establishes Poe's personal sense of place. It then examines his experiences in specific locations (Boston, Richmond, London, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York) that affected his writing, his career, and his reception. Next, the book explores imaginative spaces such as "Aidenn" in "The Raven" [Works 1:368], Ultima Thule, and what Sonya Isaak calls the "German Soulscape" of his tales of terror [215]. The volume then turns to other places (St. Petersburg, ancient Egypt, Paris, Argentina) that Poe did not know personally but which shaped his texts and his literary legacy, before ending with Poe's sense of space itself as a place in Eureka. Poe and Place also features a selected bibliography of sources on the subject and on the topics of each chapter. Even the index is well-conceived, offering a comprehensive list of entries for each city where Poe lived.

Another strength of Poe and Place is its balance between cohesiveness and variety, always difficult to achieve in a volume of this sort. Many chapters refer to each other, and most allude unobtrusively to Poe's peregrinations and his treatment of real or imaginary places, so someone who reads only a single chapter would still glean the significance of place throughout his oeuvre. Otherwise, Phillips wisely allowed contributors to craft their chapters individually in terms of the best way to approach each topic. Reading the entire book from beginning to end, one gains a steadily deepening appreciation of place's importance to Poe in all its forms: home, metropolis, culture, landscape, geography, region, country, globe, and universe.

What results is a rich, provocative, and nuanced treatment of general and specific themes. Scott Peeples's opening chapter grounds the entire volume by juxtaposing Poe's "itinerant life" against a nineteenth-century sentimental culture that valorized the home [3]. The following chapters, on Poe's association with specific cities, reinforce this theme. Katherine J. Kim traces Poe's divided feelings toward his birthplace and Boston's gradual rapprochement with Poe, in turn. Christopher P. Semtner demonstrates the lasting effects of Poe's childhood in Richmond, his education at the University of Virginia—where one professor, novelist George Tucker, may have shaped his aesthetic theory—and his first editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger. J. Gerald Kennedy, discussing the Allans' stay in England when Poe was a boy, speculates that young Edgar may have visited the British Museum, around the corner from their London flat, or toured Gothic...