Publisher's Synopsis
Poe Writing/Writing Poe brings together essays on both Edgar Allan Poe's responses to his reading and his world and later writers' responses to reading Poe. Drawn from papers originally presented at the celebrated First International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, the essays have been newly revised and updated and include work by renowned and arriving Poe scholars. The essays take on such topics as Poe's ambiguous use of Julian the Apostate in ""The Assignation,"" his 'artistic revenge' on Thomas Dunn English's novel 1844 in ""The Cask of Amontillado"", and his indebtedness to Robert Chambers' book ""Vestiges of Creation in Eureka"". The essays go on to describe Poe's sympathy with the Whigs and his turning away from American settings to European ones, culminating in the first section with a formal analysis of the 'infinite centers' in Poe's works. We then discover Nathaniel Hawthorne's use of Poe's ""The Imp of the Perverse"" in ""The Scarlet Letter"", Mark Twain's transformation of Poe's detective fiction in ""The Stolen White Elephant"", Henry James' reliance on Poe's aesthetics in Roderick Hudson, and Willa Cather's employment of Poe's ""William Wilson"" and ""The Man of the Crowd"" in ""Consequences"". The book closes with a study of contemporary writers' treatment of Poe's work and another study of Poe's presence on the Internet. The volume offers extremely fine Poe scholarship for the Poe Bicentennial.
