The complicated relationship between American and European cultural production, particularly in the nineteenth century, is the subject of this chapter. American essayists of this period were, on the one hand, greatly influenced by the literature and culture of Europe and sought to absorb its lessons into their own writing. On the other, these same essayists pushed back against the idea that European writing should be their primary influence. Instead, they frequently critiqued Europe from afar and sought to develop a new idiom and fresh form of expression unique to the United States. Writers like Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau explored the many tensions between the United States and Europe in their essays and used them to debate the extent to which America should remain in Europe’s cultural shadow.

This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

When Holmes returned to America in December 1835, he quickly completed the requirements for his Harvard medical degree and began practicing medicine. Soon after, he began teaching at Dartmouth and then Harvard. He was now using his pulpit and pen to rail against superstitions, quackery, and unsubstantiated beliefs and therapies in medicine, while making seminal contributions to his profession. He gave a lecture on phrenology in 1850, but it is not clear what he communicated. We also know that he had several phrenology books in his personal collection and used the university’s libraries, also meeting with other New England writers interested in the subject. Wanting to learn more, he had Lorenzo Fowler evaluate his head in 1859, twelve years before Mark Twain used the same phrenologist for his “little test.” What Fowler reported was preserved and is presented. Importantly, Holmes was now prepared to state what he thought about phrenology and the head readers in public.

Zupan identifies by means of in-depth analysis the stylistic features of a passage from ’The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by Edgar Allan Poe. He then compares how these features have been preserved or changed in two translations of the novel into Slovenian.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

Though in some ways Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802–1882) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) are contrasting figures in the history of American Romanticism, scholarship over the past thirty years connects them as writers whose work articulates concerns over race and enslavement. Moreover, critical recognition that each writer engages such matters emerged only in the late twentieth century, after decades of work that effaced each writer’s political resonance. This chapter approaches these issues through some of the signal trends that have informed scholarship on Emerson and Poe over the past thirty years.

Contra assumptions regarding Bishop’s privileging of perspicacity as interlinked subject and method, this essay reflects on the persistence within her poems of a haptic incessancy pursued as though for the pleasure of its own sake. The affinity between Bishop’s formulation of peninsulas taking up the water that surrounds them “like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods” and the appearance in a late essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of an identical gesture, what Sedgwick invokes as the weaver’s handshake, opens onto a consideration in both writers of an exacting inexactness resistant, for Sedgwick, to paranoid reading’s opposite tendency toward a clarity too often – in both queer theory and queer readings of Bishop’s work – treated as self-evident. Returning to Bishop’s under-examined engagement with Poe illuminates her own frequent challenging of epistemology’s queer promise, inviting our appreciation for a poetic wavering capable of withstanding even our best-intentioned corrections.