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“TheRageforLions” Edgar Allan Poe and the Culture of Celebrity Leon Jackson In the summer of 1846, Mary Gove made a series of visits to Edgar Allan Poe in Fordham, where they walked, talked, and debated the nature of authorship and its motivations. During one of these visits, Poe announced his absolute disdain for the opinion of others. “I write,” he told Gove, “from a mental necessity—to satisfy my taste and my love of art. Fame forms no motive power with me. What can I care for the judgment of a multitude, every individual of which I despise?” Gove sought to reason with Poe, but he became agitated, and she turned the conversation to other matters. When she visited him next, however, Poe seemed to have performed a complete about-face. To the rather amazed Gove he now confessed : “I love fame—I dote on it—I idolize it—I would drink to the very dregs the glorious intoxication. I would have incense ascend in my honour from every hill and hamlet, from every town and city on this earth. Fame! glory!—they are life-giving breath, and living blood. No man lives, unless he is famous! How bitterly I belied my nature, and my aspirations, when I said I did not desire fame, and that I despised it.” Gove again tried to reason with Poe, suggesting to him that perhaps his opinions varied with his frame of mind, but Poe would have none of it; his former assertions, he said, were entirely invalid, his latter the complete truth.1 Scholars have dedicated considerable energy to determining the extent to which Poe’s desire for fame was fulfilled, documenting his contemporary and posthumous reputation through the accumulation and annotation of reviews, representations, reappropriations, and other trappings of renown. More recently, they have also sought to understand Poe’s place within the contemporary Ameri­ can literary canon, bringing a variety of analytic tools to bear upon the materials collected by earlier scholars. Whether or not Poe is part of the canon—within, beneath, or outside of the so-called Ameri­ can Renaissance—is yet to be determined , although the rigor and empirical depth of recent studies move us closer 37 38 | Leon Jackson to a determination of his recent academic status.2 What has not yet been assayed, however, is what Poe himself thought of fame, status, and reputation: how he envisaged his rank within the republic of letters, and how he understood the act of ranking—what I call the use of status regimes—more generally.3 Perplexing exchanges such as the ones recorded by Gove have scarcely been analyzed, and when scholars have sought to understand Poe’s opinions of fame, status, reputation , and canonicity, they have tended to associate him with either one of his postures or the other—the fame-denying aesthete or the attention-seeking hack— rather than considering why Poe insisted on both and how he might have entertained them concurrently. Poe was, in fact, obsessed by status—his own and others’—and his musings on the subject, by turns trenchant and spiteful, inform not only his critical and editorial practice, but also his fiction and poetry. It is a topic that scholars interested in Poe, as well as in the phenomenon of status, can ill afford to ignore. Rather than focusing on what modern scholars have had to say about Poe’s posthumous status, then, I want to concentrate in this essay instead on how Poe understood his own—and his work’s—status, especially as he encountered and was compelled to negotiate the antebellum period’s many status regimes. Poe’s preoccupation with status and its many regimes, I want to argue, grew out of his experience of what sociologists call “status incongruence.” Influentially theorized by Gerhard Lenski and others in the 1950s, status incongruence refers to the condition of finding oneself endowed with a demonstrably higher degree of prestige within one domain—such as income—than within another—such as cultural achievement or political privilege. Translated into categories made popu­ lar by Pierre Bourdieu, we might say that status incongruence reflects a disparity between economic capital on the one hand and social or cultural capital on the other.Thenouveauricheandthegenteellypoorbothmanifeststatusincongruity, while those who are born to poverty or to long-established wealth do not. Those who experience status incongruence, it is conjectured, tend to extremes of political conservatism or radicalism as they seek to address the dissonance they confront . They are often also...

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