The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe
Oxford Handbooks Series

No American author of the early 19th century enjoys a larger international audience than Edgar Allan Poe. Widely translated, read, and studied, he occupies an iconic place in global culture. Such acclaim would have gratified Poe, who deliberately wrote for "the world at large" and mocked the provincialism of strictly nationalistic themes. Partly for this reason, early literary historians cast Poe as an outsider, regarding his dark fantasies as extraneous to American life and experience. Only in the 20th century did Poe finally gain a prominent place in the national canon. Changing critical approaches have deepened our understanding of Poe's complexity and revealed an author who defies easy classification. New models of interpretation have excited fresh debates about his essential genius, his subversive imagination, his cultural insight, and his ultimate impact, urging an expansive reconsideration of his literary achievement. Edited by leading experts J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, this volume presents a sweeping reexamination of Poe's work. Forty-five distinguished scholars address Poe's troubled life and checkered career as a "magazinist," his poetry and prose, and his reviews, essays, opinions, and marginalia. The chapters provide fresh insights into Poe's lasting impact on subsequent literature, music, art, comics, and film and illuminate his radical conception of the universe, science, and the human mind. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this Handbook reveals a thoroughly modern Poe, whose timeless fables of peril and loss will continue to attract new generations of readers and scholars.

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987) and, with the support of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016). He also edited the Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001) and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (2006) and co-edited Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001) as well as Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (2012). Scott Peeples is Professor of English at the College of Charleston and the author of Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (1998) and The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004), which received the Patrick F. Quinn Award from the Poe Studies Association. He has also published numerous articles on Poe and other topics in 19th-century American literature. Peeples co-edited the journal Poe Studies from 2008 to 2013 and currently serves on the editorial board of the Edgar Allan Poe Review.