Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race
Edgar Allan Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century Southerner, Poe was a deeply ambiguous figure, evading race issues while living among them, and traversing the North-South border with little sensitivity to its political implications. In this tightly organized volume, a handful of leading Americanists revisit the Poe issue, re-examining what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.
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Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race
Edgar Allan Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century Southerner, Poe was a deeply ambiguous figure, evading race issues while living among them, and traversing the North-South border with little sensitivity to its political implications. In this tightly organized volume, a handful of leading Americanists revisit the Poe issue, re-examining what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.
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Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race

Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race

Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race
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Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race

Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race

Overview

Edgar Allan Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century Southerner, Poe was a deeply ambiguous figure, evading race issues while living among them, and traversing the North-South border with little sensitivity to its political implications. In this tightly organized volume, a handful of leading Americanists revisit the Poe issue, re-examining what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780195350340
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 06/28/2001
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Lexile: 1620L (what's this?)
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Louisiana State University

University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

Introduction: Poe, Race, and Contemporary Criticism, J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg1. Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism, Terence Whalen2. The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary, Betsy Erkkila3. Edgar Allan Poe's Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier, John Carlos Rowe4. Poe, Persons, and Property, Joan Dayan5. Black, White, and Gold, Liliane Weissberg6. Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", Lindon Barrett7. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": Amalgamation Discourses and the Race Riots of 1838 in Poe's Philadelphia, Elise Lemire8. Poe's Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales, Leland Person9. "Trust No Man": Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery, J. Gerald KennedyBibliography
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Related Subjects

Literature
Literary Criticism
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
19th Century American Literature - Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous
Society & Culture in Literature
Literature
Literary Criticism
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
19th Century American Literature - Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous
Society & Culture in Literature

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