Reading Poe across Time and Space

As the study of literature in the nineteenth-century United States has become increasingly specialized, books that deal with multiple topics within the nineteenth century while also considering time periods and genres beyond the century have become rarer. Author studies themselves have faced skepticism from within the field, as junior scholars have not infrequently been discouraged from fine-grained analyses of single authors. These two observations explain why Takayuki Tatsumi's ambitiously suggestive exploration of prominent nineteenth-century US authors and their counterparts in places from Japan to Europe and in fields from film to the visual arts feels so different from much recent scholarship in the field.

Tatsumi's book is, as he states in the introduction, the product of a thirty-plus year career dedicated to reflection on nineteenth-century American literature in conversation with both literary theory and a wide range of global and contemporary interlocutors in the visual arts, film, fiction, and poetry, particularly from Tatsumi's own Japanese context. As such, the individual chapters are from different periods in Tatsumi's career, ranging from the 1980s through the present. What ties these various pieces together for Tatsumi is a dedication to the idea that texts speak to each other across time and space, a conviction that, as he shows in his introductory essay, Tatsumi shares with the authors he examines. This conviction suggests that scholars of nineteenth-century American literature cannot dispense with reading eighteenth-century German philosophers, nineteenth-century British poets, and twentieth-century Japanese novelists, or with attending to the visual arts and film from nations around the world. The essays in the volume are also distinguished by an exuberant embrace of authorship as a category that extends, rather than conflicts with, current impulses toward the transnational, comparative, interdisciplinary, and, to use Tatsumi's own term, the "transchronological" [40].

The introductory essay features an analysis of the romantic roots of nineteenth-century literature in the United States, tracing a genealogy from Emerson and Poe through Coleridge to Kant that will not be news to Poe scholars, but which is nonetheless well worth rehearsing. Tatsumi regards the temptation to "radically reread, rewrite and re-appropriate the achievements of the English Romantics" as the most distinctive feature of American romanticism, and he somewhat paradoxically discovers a model for precisely this sort of creative re-reading in Coleridge's response to Kant, finding Coleridge to be an originator of the "creative reading" that mattered so deeply to Emerson in "The American Scholar" [21–24]. In Kant's distinction between "copying" as derivative and "imitation" as generative, Tatsumi finds a precursor to Poe's complicated views on the subject of originality.

Perhaps surprisingly, given Tatsumi's Emersonian opening gambit, he devotes the first three chapters of the volume to Poe, who as a satirist and a critic could be sharply critical of Emerson. The tension between the two figures notwithstanding, Tatsumi's model makes this a reasonable starting place, given that the mode of creative imitation that Tatsumi sees as being the characteristic feature of American romanticism is especially characteristic of Poe. Tatsumi starts with a reading of race in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," moves to a discussion of Poe's involvement in mid-1840s controversies over plagiarism occasioned by the charges that he leveled against Longfellow and Hawthorne, and proceeds to a consideration of the connections between Poe's work and that of the Japanese detective writer Edogawa Rampo.

The first chapter will have less that is new to offer seasoned Poe scholars than the second and third chapters. It considers a topic that has received a great deal of attention over the past two decades: the question of whether Poe was personally racist and how Poe's own racial views might relate to the racialization present in his work. Here, Tatsumi is perhaps too quick to simplify what has been a fairly contested area of Poe scholarship. He accepts without question the line of argument that...