Preface

Summary

TO DISCUSS POE'S AFTERLIFE is really to discuss his afterlives, since he takes so many forms in literary criticism and other media. That's true of any famous, dead author, but the multiplicity of afterlives is particularly pronounced in Poe's case, partly because he is quite possibly America's most famous literary figure. The films, the countless illustrated editions and adaptations of his work, the NFL team named after his best-known poem, the tributes of mystery writers and rock musicians, the annual newspaper articles about the mysterious visitor to his grave or the latest theory of his death all keep Poe in the public eye. Even so, the Poe of 1900 differs somewhat from the Poe of 1950 or the Poe of 2003, and the Poe of American International horror films differs from the Poe who is alluded to in the novels of Paul Auster and Don DeLillo. There is a similar variety of Poes in literary criticism: the romantic Southern outcast, the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for Freudian psychoanalysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the antiracist, and so on. For over 150 years, critics have been arguing not so much about who Poe was but about what “Poe” is — that is to say, how to interpret this enormous jumble of biographical and historical documents as well as poems, fictions, essays and reviews, how to give coherence to a mass of often contradictory and incomplete texts.