- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines how Edgar Allan Poe’s angelic and mesmeric dialogues explore the nature of the body and soul, as well as the capacity of language to transcend death. These esoteric conversations respond to two dimensions of Poe’s oeuvre: an ongoing terror in the imminence of death and an effort to enact an aesthetic transcendence. Speaking from an in-between consciousness following physical death and/or through a sixth or mesmeric sense, these tales diminish the terror of death and instead imagine a more complete knowing unimpeded by the corporeal senses. In channeling his views of God and the soul through the interlocutors’ speculations, he brings to the living the redemptive designs of divine creation. Thus, these dialogues mark Poe’s mesmeric effort to retrieve the irretrievable: the divine thought that sets in motion and affirms the power of his own words.
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, angelic dialogues, death, God, mesmerism, power of words, soul, transcendence
Department of English, Kalamazoo College
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics
