Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Edgar Allan Poe (2006) (216p) [Inua].pdf

Edgar Allan Poe (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – March, 2006
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 207 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); Updated edition (March 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791085678
ISBN-13: 978-0791085677


- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world--from the English medievalists to contemporary writers- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

Editor’s Note:
My “Introduction” concedes that Edgar Allan Poe is inescapable, if only because he dreamed universal nightmares. Still, I argue, he wrote bad prose and worse poetry, best read in translation, preferably French.
Barbara Johnson, a superb rhetorical critic, juxtaposes Wordsworth and Poe, showing that the great English Romantic sought to save natural passion from the tyranny of style, while Poe gave himself to a passion for repetition.
Our leading historicist of the American Renaissance, David S. Reynolds, places the famous tale, “The Cask of Amontillado” in the contexts of Poe’s literary feuds and of contemporary popular literature.
John T. Irwin, whose critical mastery ranges from Faulkner and Hart Crane to detective fiction, analyzes Poe’s Platonic fantasy, Eureka, as a Pythagorean “mystery,” that blends sleuthing and esoteric theology.
Poe’s analytic detective stories also are handled by Shawn Rosenheim, for whom Dupin is a narrative therapist who entangles the reader, in a mode prophetic of Sigmund Freud’s.
Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe’s sole novel, concludes with a menacing white figure who can mean nearly anything, or just the abyss of nothingness. In Scott Peeples’ witty reading, all quest for meaning here blinds us, and exposes our desperate reductiveness.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is adroitly interpreted by Harriet Hustis as an instance of “the Gothic Reading,” which exposes us to endless uncertainties.
Poe’s indubitable racism is traced in the tales by Leland S. Person, who somewhat ironically finds that the author’s sublimely perverse imagination yields us also a reversal of racist values.
The ghastly “Ligeia,” extreme even for Poe, is studied by Dorothea E. von Mücke as a mythology of “the medial woman,” no longer alive but still undead.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” returns in this volume’s final essay, where John. H. Timmerman surprisingly judges the story to be a critique both of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.