4 - The Man of the Crowd: The Socio-Historical Poe

Summary

The whole period, America 1840, could be rebuilt, psychologically (phrenologically) from Poe's “method.”

— William Carlos Williams (1925)

IN THE LAST CHAPTER, I surveyed what might be called “traditional” readings of Poe that, with a few exceptions, pay little attention to the material contexts for his writings, focusing instead on form, irony, “timeless” themes and philosophical issues. While the great disruption within this tradition came from deconstruction, the real challenge to traditional Poe studies, and to traditional literary studies generally, since the 1980s has come from critics who focus attention on representations of race, gender, and class, usually by positioning the literary text in question to other texts from the same period. Chronologically, these more sociological approaches overlap with deconstruction: to the extent that they're separate movements, they shared center stage in literary criticism throughout the 1980s. The two approaches often shared practitioners as well, as deconstruction came to be regarded less as an end in itself than as a tool to dismantle texts that reinforce oppressive social structures or to show how texts that appear to endorse such structures actually undermine them. At the same time, literary critics tend not to look, for instance, only at gender to the exclusion of race and class. However, in order to give some structure to this chapter, I will proceed from race to gender to class and economics, considering discussions of Poe's role in the publishing pre-industry as part of that last, large category.