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 students alike will enjoy this single-volume treatment of Poe’s self-promotional tales and criticism.

This collection brings together more than fifty of Edgar Allan Poe's most important stories, poems, and critical writings, which established him as one of the most distinctive voices in American Literature, in a single accessible volume. Alongside annotated texts of each work, it also includes a complete Reader's Guide to Poe's work to help readers explore the contexts, style, and reception of his writing from his own time to today. An essential resource for students and teachers of Poe, this book includes stories such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Tell-Tale Heart', and 'The Purloined Letter' as well as his Gothic narrative poem 'The Raven' and some of his most significant critical writings.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote his great works while living in several cities on the East Coast of the United States, but Baltimore's claim to him is special. His ancestors settled in the burgeoning town on the Chesapeake during the 18th century, and it was in Baltimore that he found refuge when his foster family in Virginia shut him out. Most importantly, it was here that he was first paid for his literary work. If Baltimore discovered Poe, it also has the inglorious honor of being the place that destroyed him. On October 7, 1849, he died in this city, then known as "Mob Town." Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore is the first book to explore the poet's life in this port city and in the quaint little house on Amity Street, where he once wrote.

Scott Peeples here examines the many controversies surrounding the work and life of Poe, shedding light on such issues as the relevance of literary criticism to teaching, the role of biography in literary study, and the importance of integrating various interpretations into one's own reading of literature.

In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Heinz Tschachler offers an account of Edgar Allan Poe's relation to the world of banking and money in antebellum America. He contends that Poe gave the full force of his censure to the acrimonious debates about America's money, Andrew Jackson's bank war, the panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression, and the nation's inability to furnish a "sound and uniform currency." Poe's attitude is overt in his early satires, more subdued in "The Gold-Bug," and almost an undercurrent in writings that enter into and historicize the discovery of gold in California. In Poe's writings much is concealed, though his art also reveals while it conceals, in this instance, a deep felt desire for an authority that would guarantee a measure of permanence and continuity to the nation' s currency. That kind of currency was finally furnished by Abraham Lincoln (both were born in 1809; Poe died in 1849), at one time a dedicated reader of Poe's tales and sketches. Wielding his "power of regulation," Lincoln came to save the Union not just militarily but also economically. Under him, the United States government finally provided the kind of "sound and uniform currency" that Poe in his writings could only name and rehearse.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809--1849) has long occupied the position of literary outsider. Dismissed as unrepresentative of the main currents of antebellum culture, Poe commented incisively -- in fiction and nonfiction -- on nationalism, science, materialism, popular taste, and cultural ideology. Opposing the pressure to write nationalistic "American" tales or from a restricted New England perspective, he produced a body of work held in greater international esteem than that of any of his U.S. contemporaries. In Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, scholars explore Poe's anti-nationalistic Americanism as they redefine the outlines of antebellum print culture and challenge ideas that situate Poe at the margins of national thought and cultural activity. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on an often-maligned author, including essays on Poe's preoccupation with celebrity, his fascination with metropolitan crime and mystery, his impact as an observer of racial fear, his role as an eccentric cultural icon, and his fluctuating reputation in our own era. They also argue for new digital approaches that facilitate remapping of print culture. Contributors: Anna Brickhouse, Betsy Erkkila, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Leon Jackson, J. Gerald Kennedy, Maurice S. Lee, Jerome McGann, Scott Peeples, Leland S. Person, and Eliza Richards

‘Reading the Canon’ explores the relation between the production of literary value and the problem of periodization, tracing how literary tastes, particular reader communities, and sites of literary learning shape the organization of literature in historical perspective. Rather than suggesting a political critique of the canon, this book shows that the production of literary relevance and its tacit hierarchies of value are necessary consequences of how reading and writing are organized as social practices within different fields of literary activity. ‘Reading the Canon’ offers a comprehensive theoretical account of the conundrums still defining contemporary debates about literary value; the book also features a series of historically-inflected author studies—from classics, such as Shakespeare and Thomas Pynchon, to less likely figures, such as John Neal and Owen Johnson—that illustrate how the idea of literary relevance has been appropriated throughout history and across a variety of national and transnational literary institutions.