City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2005 “Neither in Nor Out of Blackwood's": The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prose Address Jonathan Hartmann Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1792 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] “NEITHER IN NOR OUT OF BLACKWOOD ’5”’: THE MARKETING OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S PROSE ADDRESS by JONATHAN HARTMANN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2005 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3159216 Copyright 2005 by Hartmann, Jonathan All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3159216 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright 2005 JONATHAN HENRY HARTMANN All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. [signature] Date Marc Dolan [signature] Date £teven Kruger V 1 Marc Dolan David S. Reynolds David S. Richter Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract “ ‘NEITHER IN NOR OUT OF BLACKWOOD ’S'”: THE MARKETING OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S PROSE ADDRESS” by Jonathan Hartmann Adviser: Professor Marc Dolan This dissertation seeks to help explain Poe’s circulation of his journalism by performing close readings of both canonical works including “William Wilson” (1839) and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and lesser-known articles such as “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” (1844) and “Loss of Breath” (1832/5). Chapter One describes Poe’s involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace prior to the enforcement of literary copyright. Chapters Two and Three treat his development of a literary brand in works including “Letter to B” (1831/6) and “A Reviewer Reviewed” by playing off his critical assertions against his practice as a critic. Chapters Four and Five treat Poe’s fiction. Chapter Four charts Poe’s development of a light gothic fictional mode that would appeal to both British and American readers. The final chapter explains Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” as a guide to his construction of unreliable yet compelling storytellers throughout his tales and criticism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V Acknowledgements I am indebted to David Reynolds for his expertise on both contemporary English usage and early American periodical publishing. I would like to thank David Richter for his patient and rigorous responses to my drafts. This project would not have been possible without the vigilance and tireless optimism of my advisor Marc Dolan, who sifted through my drafts for material with which to tie it together. Tanya Radford, Frank Duba, and Claire Pamplin contributed by asking key questions and sharing their writing insights. Thanks to Scott Adkins and the Brooklyn Writers Space for finding me a desk, and to Fred Stem and Lois Feldman for their dissertation workshops. I am grateful to Archer Irby, Heather Larson, and Won Chan Lee for sharing their approaches to the writing process. Thanks finally to my parents, who provided support and encouragement throughout the journey. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vi CONTENTS Chapter One: The Problem of Poe’s Appeal—Intellectual and Market Background 1 Chapter Two: Poe’s Composite Autobiography 23 Chapter Three: The Recycling of Critical Authority— Lessons from Coleridge and Hazlitt 59 Chapter Four: The Debunking Work of Poe’s light gothic Tales 94 Chapter Five: The Importance of Ambiguity- Unreliable Narration and the Marketing of Sensation 132 Six: Conclusion 164 Works Cited 166 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One The Problem of Poe’s Appeal: Intellectual and Market Background I. Introduction As a boy, Edgar Allan Poe read British periodical tales and criticism in the Richmond, Virginia household of his foster father, merchant John Allan. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-32), one of the most widely-read periodicals in the Jacksonian United States, was the name-brand quarterly that would provide important models for Poe’s prose journalism. One of Poe’s earliest published tales, “Loss of Breath: A TALE NEITHER IN NOR OUT OF ‘Blackwood,’” (1832) suggests his work’s straddling the Atlantic Ocean in the manner of the influential magazine. This dissertation will explain the responses to literary authority, represented byBlackwood’s, that are articulated in Poe’s tales and criticism of 1831-49. The title of this dissertation refers to Poe’s promotion of transatlantically-themed American literature: while the tales were designed to be readily reprinted in Britain and the United States, the criticism primarily targeted American audiences. This initial chapter will describe the economic conditions for Poe’s prose career. Poe’s enduring appeal begs the question of the purposes and the implied audiences for Poe’s hoaxing and ironic prose. A Romantic and psychologically- motivated school of thought typified by G.K Thompson’s Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) holds that Poe’s tales and criticism abound in two kinds of Romantic Irony: Poe may have intended not only to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 comment on the absurdity of life but also to poke fun at various audiences.1 More recent studies, especially Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999) and Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting. 1834-1853 (2003) have examined the economic motivation of Poe’s writing. Whalen sees Poe as unsuccessful in his quest to reach a readership that would combine the purchasing power of the multitude with the discernment of the elite (18). For her part, McGill finds Poe’s journalistic slight-of-hand effective in garnering the attention of American editors and audiences within a transatlantic reprint culture. This dissertation makes use of such relevant historical work in performing close readings of some well-known and also some of Poe’s less canonical essays and tales in order to investigate how his works may have affected each other’s reception. Writing in a culture marked by widespread reprinting of periodical and book-length texts that nevertheless was strongly influenced by Romantic ideology, Poe readied his articles for the broadest possible audience.2 This involved attacking Romantic notions of literary and rhetorical authority while dropping literary names in order to circulate his works and make a living. For example, Poe’s criticizing his own methods in “A Reviewer Reviewed” (1850) and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) may have struck a chord with readers eager for active engagement with journalistic prose. 1 1 See Thompson, Poe’s Fiction 20-1. 2 See McGill, American Literature 183 and Whalen 24. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 II. Conditions of the Transatlantic Literary Marketplace A. Romanticism Under Review Poe’s prose career (1831-49) took place during the intersection of three historical movements. First, Poe wrote in what Friedrich Schlegel and William Hazlitt had referred to as the Critical Age, when witty commentary was supplanting fixed ideas of literary originality. As Poe remarked in an 1841 letter to Washington Irving, “the brief, the terse, the condensed, and the easily circulated will take the place of the diffuse, the ponderous, and the inaccessible.”3 Second, literary Romanticism, translated to the United States by individual scholars and the ubiquitous British periodical press, provided readers with a reassuring set of ideals during this transition to modernity. Finally, however, the transatlantic literary marketplace governed literary production with the arrival of factory-style printing in the United States, an enormous market for