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1 - Absolute Poe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Maurice S. Lee
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Summary

Dim memories, dead lovers, old sins, former selves – almost nothing passes utterly away in Poe. Nor does faith in rational systems finally expire in his writings, for although Poe is preternaturally sensitive to the limits of enlightenment philosophy, and although he appears to anticipate postmodernism as uncannily as anyone in the nineteenth century, he remains like so many of his desperate characters driven by the crises of his moment. Melville, Emerson, Douglass, and Stowe have for decades been associated with political questions. Now somewhat belatedly but with sudden intensity a historically grounded and culturally embedded Poe is being unearthed. Whereas deconstruction and psycholinguistics used Poe in a decidedly ahistorical manner, recent scholarship sets his work within social, economic, and mass cultural contexts of the antebellum period. The problem is that Poe is becoming something of a divided figure bound by his era's political discourse but divorced from the philosophy of his day. It may be possible, however, to synthesize this instance of double consciousness by finding a more stubbornly historical Poe who not only participates in his era's broader cultural milieus but who uses historically available ideas to theorize his American world. Like Emerson, Melville, Douglass, and Stowe, Poe tries to bring philosophical order to the slavery conflict. Unlike them, the order he comes to announce is pro-slavery and virulently racist, indicating one possible use of transcendentalism in the antebellum United States.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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  • Absolute Poe
  • Maurice S. Lee, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book: Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485572.002
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  • Absolute Poe
  • Maurice S. Lee, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book: Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485572.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Absolute Poe
  • Maurice S. Lee, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book: Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485572.002
Available formats
×