Romancing the Shadow Poe and Race

by Kennedy, J. Gerald; Weissberg, Liliane

• ISBN13: 9780195137101
• ISBN10: 0195137108
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	ix
Introduction	xi
Poe, Race, and Contemporary Criticism
J. Gerald Kennedy
Liliane Weissberg
Average Racism	3	(38)
Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism
Terence Whalen
The Poetics of Whiteness	41	(34)
Poe and the Racial Imaginary
Betsy Erkkila
Edgar Allan Poe's Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier	75	(31)
John Carlos Rowe
Poe, Persons, and Property	106	(21)
John Dayan
Black, White, and Gold	127	(30)
Liliane Weissberg
Presence of Mind	157	(20)
Detection and Racialization in ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''
Lindon Barrett
``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''	177	(28)
Amalgamation Discourses and the Race Riots of 1838 in Poe's Philadelphia
Elise Lemire
Poe's Philosophy of Amalgamation	205	(20)
Reading Racism in the Tales
Leland S. Person
``Trust No Man''	225	(34)
Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery
J. Gerald Kennedy
Bibliography	259	(18)
Contributors	277	(2)
Index	279