This edited volume examines the life, works, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe from a variety of critical, biographical, and literary-historical perspectives through diverse lenses of spatiality. Eighteen contributions offer spatially-oriented investigations of the critical, intellectual, cultural, philosophical, and political spaces wherein Poe defined himself as a critic and artist. The collection comes together in four parts focusing on the Temporal and Atemporal Spaces, Social and Political Spaces, Imaginative and Psychological Spaces, and Transnational and Translated Spaces. Authors from the US, Japan, Spain, France, and Portugal represent Poe’s pervasive and ongoing international influence.
1. Introduction: Poe's Spaces and Poetic Places.- Part 1: Temporal and
Atemporal Spaces.-
2. Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time.- 3. The
Spaces of Temporal Deviance in Poe's Fiction.- 4. Etna's Observatory:
Poe's Eureka and Spaces of Literary and Scientific Recombination.- 5. When
Worlds Collide: The Convergence of Science and Faith in Eureka.- Part 2:
Social and Political Spaces.- 6. Poe's Two Tales of Bostonian
Transcendentalism.- 7. Helen of Boston: Frogpondian Shadows in the Romance of
Edgar A. Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman.- 8. Spaces of Courtship: Poe's Love
Poems and the Language of Flowers.- 9. The Menace of the Mob: Poe and
Jacksonian Populism.- 10. Purloined Voices, Paranoid Spaces: Poe, de Man, and
Nixon.- Part 3: Imaginative and Psychological Spaces.- 11. Apocalypses of the
Mind: De Quinceyan Models, Altered Consciousness, and Imagined Spaces in
Poe's Poems (1831).- 12. Acoustic Effects in the Mesmeric Space of Poe's "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".- 13. Poe's Arabesque Manner; Making Space
for Satirical Reflection.- 14. Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" as Prison of
the Mind: A Claustrophobic Space Imagined by Illustrators.- Part 4:
Transnational and Translated Spaces.- 15. Poe, Benson, and the Development of
New Aesthetic Space in Post-Bellum America.- 16. "Indestructible Fragments":
Reevaluating Borges's Thoughts on Poe's Poetry.- 17. Placing J. de Granada's
Neglected Translation of Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".- 18. Poe
Among the Spanish Fascist Writers: An Intellectual Space.- 19. From "Out of
Space" to the Expanded Page: Poe and Brazilian Concrete Poetry.
Philip Edward Phillips is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the University Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He previously edited Poe and Place (Palgrave 2018), which received the Poe Studies Associations J. Lasley Dameron Award, among several other volumes. He also currently serves as President of the Poe Studies Association.
