Poe's Pervasive Influence

Edited by Barbara Cantalupo

Not available to order

Publication date:

05 October 2012

Length of book:

168 pages

Publisher

Lehigh University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611461275

The essays in this collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association's Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. All the essays in this volume deal with Poe's influence on authors from the United States and abroad; in addition, the collection also includes two examples of primary texts by contemporary authors whose work is directly related to Poe's work or life: an interview with Japanese detective novelist Kiyoshi Kasai and poems by Charles Cantalupo.

This volume includes interpretative essays on international authors whose work reflects back on Poe’s work: Edogawa Rampo from Japan; Lu Xun from China; Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão from Portugal; Angela Carter from England; and Nikolai Gogol from Russia. The essays in this collection complement and extend a project begun by Lois Vines' Poe Abroad (University of Iowa Press, 1999) and take a wider perspective on Poe's influence with essays on Poe's impact on American authors William Faulkner, Mary Oliver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs.

Contents

Introduction
Barbara Cantalupo
Chapter 1: Pathologizing Modernity: The Grotesque in Poe and Rampo
Seth Jacobowitz
Chapter 2: Visionary Media in Edgar Allan Poe and Edogawa RampoWilliam O. Gardner
Chapter 3: Poe’s Shadow in Japan: Alternative Works and Failed Escapes
in Edogawa Rampo’s Strange Tale of Panorama Island
Mark Silver
Chapter 4: Interview with Kasai Kiyoshi
Barbara Cantalupo
Chapter 5: Lu Xun and Poe: Reading the Psyche
Diane Smith
Chapter 6: “Breaking the Law of Silence”: Rereading Poe’s “The Man
of the Crowd” and Gogol’s “The Portrait”
Alexandra Urakova
Chapter 7: “What has occurred that has (never) occurred before”:
A Case Study of the First Portuguese Detective Novel
Isabel Oliveira Martins
Chapter 8: “Around Reason Feeling”—Poe’s Impact on Fernando
Pessoa’s Modernist Proposal
Margarida Vale de Gato
Chapter 9: Poe in Place
Charles Cantalupo
Chapter 10: Ligeia—Not Me! Three Women Writers Respond to Poe
Daniel Hoffman
Chapter 11: Gothic Windows in Poe and Faulkner: “The Fall of the House
of Usher” and Absalom! Absalom!
Shoko Itoh
Chapter 12: Poe’s Progeny: Varieties of Detection in Key American Literary Texts, 1841-1861John Gruesser

For Poe's Pervasive Influence, Cantalupo (Pennsylvania State Univ., Lehigh Valley) selected ten essays, an interview with Japanese mystery novelist Kiyoshi Kasai, and poems from presentations at the Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in 2009. She notes in her introduction that this volume builds on Lois Davis Vines's Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (CH, Mar'00, 37-3793), still the important basic source for Poe's early and later international influences. Cantalupo's choices reflect many of the changes and new geographies of a decade of accelerated transnational interests in the literary world. Three essays make solid connections between Poe and Japanese fiction writer Edogawa Rampo. American gothicism, including fiction by Lafcadio Hearn and William Faulkner, has been an interest in Japan for some time; Orientalism had its influence on Poe (for example, "Tamerlane," 1827) and on other American writers. In addition to Asia, the essays reach to Russia, Portugal, and back to the US. The noted Daniel Hoffman, who died in March 2013, discusses Poe's presence in work by Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Mary Oliver. Many of the writers have previously published on Poe or the genres in which he worked. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. -- T. Bonner Jr., emeritus, Xavier University of Louisiana