Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Chapter 10 Poe, Decentered Culture, and Critical Method

Poe,DecenteredCulture,andCriticalMethod Jerome McGann Some of the most important scholarship in antebellum Ameri­ can literature and culture has emerged in the past fifteen years, much of it examining Poe and his circle of friends and enemies. The work is especially significant because it implicitly —and sometimes explicitly—calls for a distinctively new kind of critical and scholarly methodology. Poe and his Ameri­can scene provide an illuminating model for studying the issues. But in fact the case is broadly relevant to literary and cultural studies tout court. The case of Poe and his contemporary context— the interpretational problems that arise when we try to study that scene and its specific materials—expose a pressing scholarly need that has emerged with the emergence of digital technology.1 Here’swhathappened.JonathanElmer’simportant1995studyofPoeandmass culture, Reading at the Social Limit, began a major reorientation of our critical perspective on the antebellum period in general. This came about because Elmer reconceived Poe less as a self-identical author than as a social “symptom.” Elmer’s book exposed the codependent relation operating between Poe’s reflections of (and on) his world, and the reciprocal ways Poe was “imagined by mass culture.”2 Terence Whalen elaborated this critical procedure in his 1999 book Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses. Then followed two books that extended this sociohistorical critical line in more general ways: Timothy Powell offered, in Ruthless Democracy , “A Multicultural Interpretation of the Ameri­can Renaissance” (published in 2000), and Betsy Erkkila cast an even wider net when she set about “Rethinking Ameri­ can Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars” (2005). In sharp contrast to previous studies of the antebellum period and the “Ameri­can Renaissance ,” these works did not set Poe to the side; rather, they made him a pivotal figure.3 Two other books entered that context of sociohistorical work and gave it a decisive focus. These were Meredith McGill’s Ameri­ can Literature and the Culture 245 246 | Jerome McGann of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003) and Eliza Richards’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (2004). Proceeding from the vantage of production history in one case (McGill) and reception history in the other (Richards), both demonstrated the necessity of conceiving textual works as social functions. The ding an sich of (say) “The Raven” is not a self-identical object, what Stanley Burnshaw —in an influential mid-century formulation—named “The Poem Itself”;4 it is a set of precise but variable relations defined by specific persons and social agents operating in a discourse field (for instance, “antebellum America”). Interpreting “The Raven”—I am choosing it arbitrarily, any work would serve as an example —requires the exposure of as many of those field relations as possible. Highly significant conclusions follow from this scholarly work, and both McGill and Richards made them explicit. If we are to operate in this kind of critical horizon, Richards observes, we need “a model of literary history that . . . is intersubjective and interactive,” because in fact “the poetics of creation are inseparable from the poetics of reception.” Or as McGill expresses it: “An author-centered criticism necessarily collapses the range of obscured, withheld, projected, and disavowed forms of authorship” that are always operating in complex discursive fields.5 While neither Richards nor McGill synthesizes such “a model of literary history ,” their work supplies impressive practical instances. But recent antebellum Ameri­ can scholarship is, as I’ve already suggested, replete with arresting examples . Clearly derivative from the broad New Historicist movement that emerged between1970and1990,thisAmeri­canworkgainsitsspecialscholarlysignificance from the extreme volatility of its materials. The dominantly Modernist orientation of the scholarship in that late-twentieth-century moment customarily took revolutionary epochs—most notably the epoch of the French Revolution—as models of historical complexity and contradiction. But those special historical periods tempted scholars to draw maps only of serious history, so to speak—history as tragedy. But in antebellum America—or Victorian En­ gland for that matter —history comes at once as tragedy and as farce, as Marx saw so clearly. Such historical moments pose a wonderful and difficult challenge, and an opportunity, for scholarship. As Reynolds and Kennedy have been urging us to remember,6 antebellum America pivots around multiple centers—Boston where Poe was born, Richmond where he launched his public life, Philadelphia where he failed, New York where he was crucified, Baltimore where he died. Orbiting around those and Poe...