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.

This collection of fifteen original essays and one original poem explores the theme of “place” in the life, works, and afterlife of Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849). Poe and Place argues that “place” is an important critical category through which to understand this classic American author in new and interesting ways. The geographical “places” examined include the cities in which Poe lived and worked, specific locales included in his fictional works, imaginary places featured in his writings, physical and imaginary places and spaces from which he departed and those to which he sought to return, places he claimed to have gone, and places that have embraced him as their own. The geo-critical and geo-spatial perspectives in the collection offer fresh readings of Poe and provide readers new vantage points from which to approach Poe’s life, literary works, aesthetic concerns, and cultural afterlife.

Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation as an enduring and influential American literary critic rests mainly upon the pieces in this edition. Editors Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine provide reading texts, detailed explanatory footnotes, variant readings, and introductions to show context. They also face frankly the contradictions in Poe’s critical dicta. Poetry is for pleasure, not truth, Poe says, but argues that poetic inspiration leads to truth. Great works, Poe says, result from studied calculation, but also from irrational, supernal sources. Both biting critic and doughty defender of American artistic achievement, Poe was contemptuous of democratic art, except when he manned the barricades in its defense. Critical Theory highlights such conflicting ideas and suggests why they are present. This edition shows that what is consistent in Poe is not any single theory. Rather, always present are wit, playfulness, concern for the strong effect, a bin of recyclable allusions, anecdotes and quotations, and a writer’s discipline. His writing on theory is of a piece with his fiction, poetry, and journalism. The Levines explain how these pieces also tie in tightly to the social, political, economic, and technological history of the world in which Poe lived.

Engaging Worlds: Core Texts and Cultural Contexts asks what do we learn of texts, cultures, and the world’s dynamics when we read core texts, widely and deeply, in core-structured programs of the world’s colleges and universities? What books, what arts, what associations and institutions, what sciences, what religions, what cultures, what educations, what citizens, what scholars, are we preparing for the future through an education in core texts that engages our worlds? The answers offered in these selected proceedings are drawn from the widest possible spectrum of institutions and disciplines who, through core programs, offer horizon-expanding liberal educations.

Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction.

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.

This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'—defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture—an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem—a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.