Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Introduction

Introduction J. Gerald Kennedy Amid commemorations of Edgar Poe’s bicentennial year, a contingent of literary scholars met at the University of Virginia to launch a collaborative research project. While less theatrical than the restaging of Poe’s burial in Baltimore, this gathering confronted the author’s anomalous, problematic position in Ameri­ can literary history as well as the larger, more complex question of how to remap the burgeoning, dispersed print culture that facilitated the invention of Ameri­ can literature between 1820 and 1850. The Charlottesville event had been initiated by Jerome McGann, best known for his work in Romantic and Victorian literature as well as in textual editing but more recently a herald of digital humanities research and a converted Ameri­ canist. McGann himself proposed the trope of “remapping” that invited participating scholars to rethink the cultural space in which Poe operated—the extent and configuration of an emerging literary culture constructed less (it now seems) by the monumental achievements of a few revered authors than by the accumulated compositions of “scribbling” women and men—to repurpose Hawthorne’s complaint—whose poetry and prose filled newspapers, magazines, annuals, and books emanating from presses across the country. Contrary to Emerson’s romantic claim that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Ameri­ can literature emerged from the impromptu collaboration of editors, publishers, and authors—a self-appointed literati who in response to the opportunities of an expanding print culture produced belles lettres for the masses.1 The task of figuratively remapping this phenomenon presents challenges of its own. In a lively, deconstructive book, Denis Wood has shown how cartography —especially the sort produced before global positioning satellites—typically performs several covert tasks in its representation of a spatial domain.2 According to Wood, maps “mask the interests that bring them into being” (95). They serve unstated political or cultural purposes; they construct rather than reproduce a 1 2 | Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture world, privileging certain vantage points; they participate in the very histories they help to instantiate; they simultaneously present and suppress information through selectivity; and they embody signs and codes that subtly manipulate the entire map-reading process. Wood offers a chastening critique, and participants in the project wished to avoid a mere re-centering of antebellum print culture— famously conceived by F. O. Matthiessen in Ameri­can Renaissance (1941) to revolve around Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman on an axis from Boston to New York—that would position Poe at the crux of another fixed national cartography. We wished instead to remap the space of antebellum print culture horizontally, not from a top-down, hierarchical perspective that would reinscribe literary preeminence. Poe would figure not as the unrecognized Master Genius, but rather as a shrewd, peripatetic author-journalist whose circulation in what he called “Literary America” epitomized the ploys and practices of a horizontal culture of letters sustained by proliferative redistribution. In her illuminating study of the “culture of reprinting,” Meredith McGill underscores the diffused, regional nature of U.S. literary culture and the haphazard dissemination of republished fiction and poetry.3 Poe figures notably in McGill ’s account, presenting “a career charted through the heart of this culture” (151) and instancing a brilliant adaptability to the peculiar, even bizarre conditions of a largely unregulated print industry. Like many of his contemporaries (Hawthorne and Child also come to mind), Poe perceived himself as “essentially a magazinist.”4 He worked within a network of competing periodicals and contended with the vagaries of public taste as well as the “horrid laws of political economy”—the market forces so astutely analyzed by Terence Whalen.5 But Poe was likewise enmeshed in a system built upon the unchecked reprinting of literary compositions—the unremunerated republication of what he and others regarded as their intellectual property. McGill shows how an obstinate republican faith in the free circulation of books and ideas militated against copyright protection ; this was an ethos that newspaper and magazine publishers promoted to ensure their right to reprint (and profit from) virtually any published material that came their way. Literary texts thus had a life of their own, moving across the antebellum landscape from journal to journal, pragmatically re-edited to fit local needs and available column space. Sometimes editorial reformatting eliminated the authorial byline or the original print source of the material. Yet rooted in the imperatives of what Benedict Anderson has called “print-­ capitalism,” this exploitative, inherently predatory system performed the...