The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe

by Hartmann; Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780415963541
• ISBN10: 0415963540
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Edgar Allan Poe is today considered one of the greatest masters and most fascinating figures of the American literary world. However, an examination of Poe's essays and criticism throughout his prose publishing career (1831-1849) reveals that the author himself played a vital role in the creation and manipulation of his own reputation. During his twenties and thirties, Poe promoted his writing to magazine editors in the United States and in Europe through several strategies. He painted a Romantic and patriotic self-portrait in his fiery literary reviews, even as he played up his own connections, both real and imaginary, to literary celebrities including Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, George Gordon Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through recycling plots, atmosphere, and language (including his own) from American and British magazines, he built stories and essays which were linked in a complex network of references to each other and their author. Teachers and studentsalike will enjoy this single-volume treatment of Poe's self-promotional tales and criticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
The Problem of Poe's Appeal: Intellectual and Market Background	p. 1
Poe's Composite Autobiography	p. 14
The Recycling of Critical Authority: Lessons from Coleridge and Hazlitt	p. 37
The Debunking Work of Poe's light gothic Tales	p. 59
The Importance of Ambiguity: Unreliable Narration and the Marketing of Sensation	p. 82
Afterword	p. 101
Notes	p. 103
Bibliography	p. 119
Index	p. 131
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