Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe’s acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the “undercurrent of meaning” ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe’s art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe’s engagement in the major discourses of the time – religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe’s debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe’s texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection – “The Gold Bug,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales.
The essays in the collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. The contributors are Poe scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada: Amy C. Branam, Lauren Curtright, Daniel Fineman, William E. Engel, John C. Havard, Henri Justin, John Edward Martin, Sean Moreland, Philip E. Phillips, Stephanie Sommerfeld, and Timothy N. Towslee.
" This volume of essays is a wonderful tribute to the scholarly achievements of Professor Baker. "
"The volume is . . . alive with pieces that, rather than uncritically celebrating her achievements, discuss, refine, and sometimes take issue with her views."
"The Wife of Bath in Afterlife is a must-read not only for all serious-minded Chaucerian scholars but also for avid readers who earnestly endeavor to enhance their knowledge about theWife of Bath and to broaden their capacity for learning.”
-- Christina Pinkston, Norfolk State University
Review of Fiddled out of Reason, by John William Knapp
"a valuable contribution to our understanding of the hymn as a literary and cultural phenomenon."
-- Joshua Swidzinski, University of Portland
The Final Days of Edgar Allan Poe, by David F. Gaylin, has been "recommended for all readers" by Choice Reviews and was listed in their Community College Top 75 titles.
"This engaging collection redresses the balance of Poe studies to consider his work from the perspective of women, those in his works and those reading them. . . . [It] offers a welcome emphasis on the irrepressibility of women in his work who ‘die but do not stay dead’"
Very much in the spirit of Robertson's many impacts on our field, this collection opens a range of fascinating apertures into the medieval literary world that promise to be useful, both to fellow scholars and in a variety of literature classrooms.
New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature not only makes a fitting tribute to a beloved scholar and teacher; it constitutes a significant contribution to the field in its own right. The essays in this beautifully presented book will be essential reading for anyone interested in late-medieval vernacular theology and its reception, both in England and beyond.
--Nicholas Watson, professor of English, Harvard University
Dolan and Labbe’s wide-ranging yet cohesive collection of essays offers a comprehensive and convincing breadth that succeeds in its mission of placing Charlotte Smith. Beyond Smithian scholarship, the volume comes at a prescient time.
--Heather Heckman-McKenna University of Missouri-Columbia
