A groundbreaking exploration of one of America's most iconic and misunderstood authors

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life is the most comprehensive critical biography of Poe yet produced, exploring his fascinating life, his extraordinary work, and the vital relationship between the two. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre found in such works as The Raven, Annabel Lee, and The Tell-Tale Heart, this legendary American author continues to intrigue and enthrall his devoted readers. Written by one of the world's leading Poe experts, this biography is a rich and rewarding study for the general reader as well as for the seasoned scholar. Richard Kopley combines a biographical narrative of Poe's enduring challenges--including his difficult foster father, his personal losses, his great struggles with depression and alcoholism, and the poverty that dogged his existence--with close readings of his work that focus not only on plot, character, and theme but also on language, allusion, and structure in a way that enhances our understanding of both. While incorporating past Poe scholarship, this volume also relates unknown stories of Poe culled from privately held letters unavailable to previous biographers, presenting a range of groundbreaking archival discoveries that illuminate the man and his oeuvre in ways never before possible.

The interpreter's dream-text, as one critic called Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has prompted critical approaches almost as varied as the experiences it chronicles. This is the first book to deal exclusively with Pym, Poe's longest fictional work and in many ways his most ambitious. Here leading Poe scholars provide solutions and interpretations for many challenging enigmas in this mysterious novel.
The product of a decade of research and planning, Poe's Pym offers a factual basis for some of the most fantastic elements in the novel and uncovers surprising connections between Poe's text and exploration literature, nautical lore, Arthurian narrative, nineteenth-century journalism, Moby Dick, and other writings. Representing a rich cross-section of current modes of literary study-from source study to psychoanalytic criticism to new historicism-these sixteen essays probe issues such as literary influence, the limits of language, racism, the holocaust, prolonged mourning, and the structure of the human mind. Poe's Pym will be an invaluable resource for students of both contemporary criticism and nineteenth-century American culture.

Contributors. John Barth, Susan F. Beegel, J. Lasley Dameron, Grace Farrell, Alexander Hammond, David H. Hirsch, John T. Irwin, J. Gerald Kennedy, David Ketterer, Joan Tyler Mead, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Carol Peirce, Burton R. Pollin, Alexander G. Rose III, John Carlos Rowe, G. R. Thompson, Bruce I. Weiner

The interpreter's dream-text, as one critic called Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has prompted critical approaches almost as varied as the experiences it chronicles. This is the first book to deal exclusively with Pym, Poe's longest fictional work and in many ways his most ambitious. Here leading Poe scholars provide solutions and interpretations for many challenging enigmas in this mysterious novel.
The product of a decade of research and planning, Poe's Pym offers a factual basis for some of the most fantastic elements in the novel and uncovers surprising connections between Poe's text and exploration literature, nautical lore, Arthurian narrative, nineteenth-century journalism, Moby Dick, and other writings. Representing a rich cross-section of current modes of literary study--from source study to psychoanalytic criticism to new historicism--these sixteen essays probe issues such as literary influence, the limits of language, racism, the holocaust, prolonged mourning, and the structure of the human mind. Poe's Pym will be an invaluable resource for students of both contemporary criticism and nineteenth-century American culture.

Contributors. John Barth, Susan F. Beegel, J. Lasley Dameron, Grace Farrell, Alexander Hammond, David H. Hirsch, John T. Irwin, J. Gerald Kennedy, David Ketterer, Joan Tyler Mead, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Carol Peirce, Burton R. Pollin, Alexander G. Rose III, John Carlos Rowe, G. R. Thompson, Bruce I. Weiner

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted.
Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

An investigation of the phenomenon of the framed formal center in literature of the last 180 years, illuminating both the works and correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations.

This book concerns the framed center in selected literary works of the 19th to 21st centuries. Such a center involves a critical passage bracketed by two halves of a text that feature language and/or plot that mirror each other. Recognizing the author's formal emphasis on the critical central passage encourages a thoughtful attention to it. Like other literary techniques, including allegory and metaphor, the framed center does not provide a single meaning, but rather makes possible varied meanings depending on the work. And often it features other literary patterns, including parallelism, chiasmus, mise en abyme, and allusion. There have been book-length studies of the framed center in literary works from the Bible through Tristram Shandy, but no such studies have addressed more recent literature. This book's analysis of the framed center in literature of the last 180 years - in works by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Carroll, Joyce, Anderson, Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, Highsmith, Oates, and Zadie Smith - advances interpretation of the design itself and of the individual works, yielding critical breakthroughs. It alsoreveals hitherto unknown correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations. This book is a work of practical criticism with substantial interpretive consequences, and it is accessible to a broad audience.

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted.
Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.