Welcome to Poe's America

I want formally to welcome you to this class and to encourage you to explore this website thoroughly. Throughout the semester I will post updates, announcements, and new materials for our consideration. This site is a medium through which you are encouraged to interact with me and with your fellow students, and I hope it will be a place where we can all learn together. Again, welcome.

Theme of the Course

By the 1830s self-possession had become the preoccupation of the industrializing world. Capitalism stressed self-possession; so did the movements that emerged to reform it -- temperance, women's rights, abolition. For his part, Poe was merely possessed -- a slave to the market, to drink, to the pressing needs of women, to his own ambitions for himself. And try as he might Poe could not write himself free. The detectives he created were inseparable from the madmen they pursued. The women he murdered would never stay dead. The readership he courted he also despised. Poe, a contemporary critic marveled, had somehow slipped "below the suicide point [where] death open[ed] up no hope for him [because] his quarrel [was] not with life on earth [but] with being anywhere."

In this class, Poe is the wild-eyed barker who ushers you into the haunted funhouse that is the antebellum imagination. Once strapped in, you are in for a sensational ride, a lurid tour not of the world Poe created but of the world that created Poe -- a world of mechanical chess players, mummies, mermaids, mesmerism, murder, madness, revenant ladies and impotent men, Antarctic exploration, secret societies and encrypted writing, detectives and confidence men, hoaxes, phrenology, perversity, séances, and all that simultaneously titillated and terrified antebellum America.