- 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 updates psychoanalytic concerns already identified in Poe with the temporal dimension of trauma theory known as Nachträglichkeit. First translated by Freud’s editor James Strachey as “deferred action,” this important concept is now more appropriately translated as “afterwardsness.” My case study uncovers a relationship between traumatic time in Poe’s satiric sendup of sensation in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament” and his emphasis on “vivid effects” in “The Philosophy of Composition.” The argument includes Poe’s use of the word graphicality in a review of Margaret Fuller, sometimes thought to be the target of his earlier satires. Poe’s intense if ambivalent engagement with Fuller’s writing highlights a temporal dimension often obscured by earlier psychoanalytic readings, allowing us to consider the value of trauma theory for understanding the evasive operations of history so vital to his appeal.
Keywords: afterwardsness, flashback, graphicality, history, Freud, Margaret Fuller, Nachtrglichkeit, trauma theory, vivid effects
Department of English, Haverford College
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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
