- 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 chapter addresses Edgar Allan Poe’s relation to postmodernism in three parts. It first considers the postmodern elements of Poe’s writing with an emphasis on hoaxes, metafictional self-referentiality, fragmentation, and an overall postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Next it offers an overview of how Poe’s fiction has been used by poststructuralist theorists—notably, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Barbara Johnson—as well as critics including Dennis Pahl, Michael J. S. Williams, J. Gerald Kennedy, and Louis A. Renza, to illustrate poststructuralist claims about the nature of the self and language. Finally, it explores how the postmodern elements present in Poe’s fiction make him attractive to modern sensibilities. This final section considers the commodification not just of Poe’s writing but of Poe himself—how his biography and image themselves become postmodern narratives available for appropriation and exploitation in the contemporary culture of the Gothic.
Keywords: author function, Barbara Johnson, fragmentation, historiographic metafiction, hoax, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Myth of Poe, perverseness
Department of English, Central Michigan University
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- 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
