Project MUSE®: Poe Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Poe Studies.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 34 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Poe StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Poe Studies1754-60951947-4644Latest articles in Poe Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971624
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In this volume’s special feature, “The Poe/tics of Reception,” guest edited by Elissa Zellinger, contributors reflect on the pathbreaking arguments in Eliza Richards’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception (2004) and extend them in unexpected and valuable new directions. Zachary Turpin and Alexandra Socarides examine Poe’s professional relationships with, respectively, Sarah Josepha Hale and Lydia Sigourney, showing the impact these women had on Poe’s career. Christa Holm Vogelius argues that in “The Oval Portrait” Poe performs a queer femme persona, thereby destabilizing the conventionalized gender binary. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher demonstrates that in “The Gold-Bug” the spectre of the Haitian revolution (via
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2025-10-13text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®38732026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Introduction: Twenty Years of the Poe/tics of Reception
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971625
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This special feature takes as its starting point the twentieth anniversary of Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle by Eliza Richards (2004).1 Over the last two decades, this monograph has proven foundational for scholarship on American women poets in the nineteenth century. Numerous texts have used Richards’s book as a touchstone, but at a potential cost: the original focus on Poe has slipped away. Inspired by Richards, scholars expanded Poe’s circle to recover nineteenth-century women poets while effectively ignoring Poe’s impact on their legacy. This special feature seeks to reexamine Poe’s influence on the nineteenth-century print public sphere—and on scholarship about that sphere—in the twenty
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallIntroduction: Twenty Years of the Poe/tics of Reception2025-10-13text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Twenty Years of the Poe/tics of Reception2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®460532026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Eureka!: A Survey of Women Discovering, and Rediscovering, Poe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971626
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In 1993, feminist scholar Colin Dayan announced in this journal—with equal amounts hope and exasperation, I imagine—that “there is a great deal at stake when we talk about Poe and women.”1 At that time, such a statement was hardly taken as a given by Poe scholars or scholars of nineteenth-century American literature. Quite to the contrary, in fact. On the one hand, during Poe’s lifetime his estimation of womanhood, femininity, and even feminism (such as it was) could be not only positive but at times progressive and nuanced. On the other hand, Poe, as Eliza Richards has argued at length, piggybacked off the circulation of women writers’ poetry and appropriated their lyric forms, to the benefit of his literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallEureka!: A Survey of Women Discovering, and Rediscovering, Poe2025-10-13text/htmlen-USEureka!: A Survey of Women Discovering, and Rediscovering, Poe2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®1421262026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13“That sin which in poetry is not to be forgiven”: The Poe-Sigourney Correspondence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971627
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When Eliza Richards published Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle in 2004 she made things possible that we hadn’t yet known were possible.1 She initiated a way of looking at nineteenth-century American poetry that situated the work of little-known women poets as central to the poetics of the period. This was unlike the recovery work that Richards’s predecessors had undertaken, in that Richards was less interested in resurrecting the forgotten poetesses of the past and more interested in showing how their work—their poems, their processes, their influences—was embedded in nineteenth-century American literary culture and, by extension, in the canonical texts and figures that had come to define the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmall“That sin which in poetry is not to be forgiven”: The Poe-Sigourney Correspondence2025-10-13text/htmlen-US“That sin which in poetry is not to be forgiven”: The Poe-Sigourney Correspondence2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®759732026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Thinking with Love: Poe’s Queer Mimicries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971628
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Queer and feminist scholarship has long encouraged us to take the feelings we have for books, for characters, and for authors seriously, to understand these affective relations as central to the acts of reading and writing. Nineteenth-century literature, which often engages so directly with its readers and makes such explicit demands of them, lends itself particularly well to these modes of consumption. Criticism may reveal as much about the critic as the text, but that in some ways is also the point, or at least part of the point. As Ben Bascom writes in his recent reexamination of Poe through the “complicated attachments” of editor Rufus Griswold, “Perhaps if we rethink criticism as an expression of love—of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallThinking with Love: Poe’s Queer Mimicries2025-10-13text/htmlen-USThinking with Love: Poe’s Queer Mimicries2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®823692026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Spectres of Toussaint: Rereading Poe and Hugo through the Poethics of W. E. B. Du Bois
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971629
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In a well-known passage of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison insightfully describes a “visualized but somehow closed and unknowable white form” in Edgar Allan Poe’s work—a sublime figure, indeed, which stands unmatched in its significance. For Morrison, this image of the white sublime in Poe, arising at the crossroads of race and place, functions as an indispensable critical framework, offering a radical analytic and epistemological lens through which to interpret his work. Particularly in the second section of Playing in the Dark, “Romancing the Shadow,” as well as in her 1997 essay “Interlude: Slavery and ‘Americanness,’” Morrison provides not only a significant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallSpectres of Toussaint: Rereading Poe and Hugo through the Poethics of W. E. B. Du Bois2025-10-13text/htmlen-USSpectres of Toussaint: Rereading Poe and Hugo through the Poethics of W. E. B. Du Bois2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®1054142026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Literary History and Critical Reception
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971630
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After reading the thoughtful contributions to this special feature, I’m struck by the complex, vibrant relations between mentoring, teaching, networking, professionalizing, and writing with the goal of contributing in a vital way to a field of scholarly inquiry: all are grounded in messy acts of sharing that trouble and confound the boundaries of individual identity. Attribution and acknowledgement, citing and appropriating, giving and receiving, imitating and innovating are intertwined pleasures, problems, and challenges as we make our way through an increasingly tenuous profession that can feel like a vocation. Having this occasion to reflect on the poetics of reception surrounding my own work affirms for me that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallLiterary History and Critical Reception2025-10-13text/htmlen-USLiterary History and Critical Reception2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®450162026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Photography, Scientific Discovery, and Narrative Invention in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Other Tales
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971631
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Each of us, at some point, experiences a sudden inkling, a flash of insight, a faintly glimmering “glow-worm-like conception” of the truth, as amateur scientist William Legrand puts it in “The Gold-Bug” (Works, 3:829). Occasionally, such an intimation leads, through a long, tedious process of research that tests our conviction and resolve, to an actual discovery. But how can we convey the significance of our accomplishment to someone else? By telling them a story about it, of course—just as Legrand does when recounting his successful analysis to the story’s narrator.Edgar Allan Poe was profoundly aware of connections between scientific discovery and literary innovation. During the early 1840s, he established new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallPhotography, Scientific Discovery, and Narrative Invention in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Other Tales2025-10-13text/htmlen-USPhotography, Scientific Discovery, and Narrative Invention in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Other Tales2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®1343162026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Section Editor’s Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971633
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For the sixth rendition of “Newly Translated Poe Scholarship,” we offer a second translation from Japan and a translation from a Nicaraguan poet who traveled all over the Americas and Europe. “‘The Raven’ and the Philosophy of Refrain” provides a snapshot from the prolific career of Dr. Shoko Itoh, a prominent Japanese scholar of Poe and his contemporaries. “From The Strange Ones” demonstrates Poe’s profound influence on and presence in the modernismo movement in Spanish America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Both translations are collaborative works between professors and scholars of translation and their students, supporting both current and future generations of translators. “‘The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallSection Editor’s Note2025-10-13text/htmlen-USSection Editor’s Note2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®26332026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Note: Shoko Itoh as Poe Scholar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971634
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It is my great pleasure to be able to publish here the English version of “‘The Raven’ and the Philosophy of Refrain,” written by distinguished Poe scholar Dr. Shoko Itoh, professor emeritus of Hiroshima University and the third president of the Poe Society of Japan (PSJ) (2020–present). In the larger work from which this translation comes, Dr. Itoh applies the New Critical and phenomenological approach to the American Romantics with special emphasis on Poe and Melville, trying to renovate the Matthiessen canon that had long dominated studies of the American Renaissance.I first met Dr. Itoh in 1980 at the annual conference of the American Literature Society of Japan (ALSJ) held at Shimane University located in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallNote: Shoko Itoh as Poe Scholar2025-10-13text/htmlen-USNote: Shoko Itoh as Poe Scholar2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®74582026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13“The Raven” and the Philosophy of Refrain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971635
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The raven became Poe’s evocative bird, and his poem “The Raven” (1845), in which said bird appears, also became the most popular poem of his oeuvre. Like Melville’s whale, Poe’s raven is also one of the great images to which American literature has given birth. There is likely nothing that can possibly surpass the rich symbolism, the supernatural feel, and the black-and-white constraint of these two images. The literary world inhabited by these two men, who were overlapping contemporaries, was the subject of a detailed study by Perry Miller under the title The Raven and the Whale.1 However, as is the case with Melville and (Nathaniel) Hawthorne, or Poe and Hawthorne, there is no open and dramatic encounter between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmall“The Raven” and the Philosophy of Refrain2025-10-13text/htmlen-US“The Raven” and the Philosophy of Refrain2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®870152026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Note: Rubén Darío on Poe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971636
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Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet and the founder of Spanish American modernismo, probably did more to bolster Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation throughout Spanish America than any writer who came before him. Darío imbibed Poe from two founts—the works of Charles Baudelaire and the French symbolists and Poe’s writings themselves. Poe’s influence on Darío is less visible in the latter’s poetry, although an occasional poem recalls Poe’s aesthetics or even overtly alludes to his works,1 and more evident in his own tragic persona (including his alcoholism) and in his crafting of the literary movement modernismo. In his 1896 book concerning many of his literary influences, Los raros [The Strange Ones], Darío dedicates a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallNote: Rubén Darío on Poe2025-10-13text/htmlen-USNote: Rubén Darío on Poe2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®49642026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13From The Strange Ones
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971637
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Every day affirms with greater brilliance the already unblemished glory of Edgar Poe, starting with his prestigious introduction by Baudelaire, later crowned by the transcendentally sympathetic and seductive spirit of Stéphane Mallarmé. But of all that has been written about the wretched American poet, very little will reach the depth and beauty contained in Mauclair’s essay. His is an instrumental chapter on the psychology of misfortune, which on certain souls will have the effects of a medicine, the sensation of a refreshing and invigorating wave. Here the searching, penetrating spirit casts the Poesque ideology in a new light, and many points that may have appeared veiled or obscure before are seen in the soft
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallFrom The Strange Ones2025-10-13text/htmlen-USFrom The Strange Ones2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®335132026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971638
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Irina Arévalo Valverde graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in Spanish translation and a minor in editing. Originally from San José, Costa Rica, she developed a love for languages and translation early in life, especially after moving to the United States at the age of fifteen. She has coauthored research on AI in translation and Spain’s reception of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and she is preparing to study literature and translation at the graduate level. She is a volunteer editor for an independent student publication that highlights underrepresented voices in the local community, and she spends her free time watching ballet, going to plays, and salsa dancing.William Foster Carr is an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-10-13text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®112712026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13The Many Deaths of Edgar Allan Poe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971639
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It has not gone unremarked that Poe’s mysterious and controversial death, including the events that led up to it and its immediate cause, was eminently suited to the writer’s status as the inventor of the modern detective story, but so far no literary, historical, or scientific Dupin has been able to arrive at an incontrovertibly convincing solution to this longstanding mystery. Attempts to provide a fuller account of Poe’s death began immediately after its occurrence on Sunday morning, October 7, 1849, in a Baltimore hospital, and continued among his myriad biographers; indeed, there has been an uptick in interest within the last few decades as literary sleuths and medical professionals have sifted the data with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallThe Many Deaths of Edgar Allan Poe2025-10-13text/htmlen-USThe Many Deaths of Edgar Allan Poe2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®225012026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13From Nevermore to Forevermore, or, How Poe Haunts Today
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971641
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Suzanne Collins’s homage to Edgar Allan Poe in Sunrise on the Reaping (2025) strikes me as at once inescapable and insidious. Collins’s allusions to “The Raven”—Poe’s most memorable poem—act as a kind of literary shorthand, infusing her work with Poe’s trademark macabre melancholia. When your book revolves, as Sunrise on the Reaping does, around the death of a beautiful woman, fully embracing the pastiche and naming that beautiful woman Lenore seems only fair, given Poe’s philosophy of composition. After all, Oscar Wilde’s attributed belief that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness” would seem to cast the artifacts of great literature within the popular fiction of today
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallFrom Nevermore to Forevermore, or, How Poe Haunts Today2025-10-13text/htmlen-USFrom Nevermore to Forevermore, or, How Poe Haunts Today2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®148782026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971642
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Alissa Burger is an Associate Professor of English at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri, where she teaches a wide range of composition and literature courses. Her areas of specialization are horror and the American Gothic in literature and popular culture. Her most recent book is IT Chapters 1 and 2 (Liverpool Univ. Press, 2023), part of the Devil’s Advocates series, and she is currently working on a book on literary geography in the work of Stephen King.Jonathan A. Cook is the author of Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence Man” (1996); Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of “Moby-Dick” (2012); and Neither Believer nor Infiel: Skepticism and Faith
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-10-13text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®35392026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13Following In Poe’s Wake
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971646
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Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric addresses a wide range of texts from across diverse media, with unifying analysis grounded in the visual and auditory sensations evoked by Poe’s work. With this unique approach, Elmer provides a new avenue for exploring the author’s lasting legacy that highlights and privileges sensory experience. Elmer embraces an array of adaptations, situating them within the framework of what he refers to as “the Poe brand,” a pervasive familiarity with Poe’s work and life that enables adapters to take a “freewheeling mix-and-match attitude to Poe’s words, works, and biography” [3]. Within this context, Poe’s work serves as a foundation that can be drawn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/613/image/coversmallFollowing In Poe’s Wake2025-10-13text/htmlen-USFollowing In Poe’s Wake2025-10-132025TWOProject MUSE®135042026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-10-13