Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The nine essays gathered here pursue the provocative implications of Toni Morrison's claim that no early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of "American Africanism," an image of racialized blackness destined to haunt the Euro-American imagination. As contributors to this volume reveal, Poe's response to the "shadow" of blackness--like his participation in the cultural construction of whiteness--was both problematic and revealing. Born in Boston but raised mostly in Richmond, surrounded by the practices of slaveholding culture, Poe seems to have shared notions of racial hierarchy and Anglo-Saxon supremacy pervasive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. That he promulgated racist stereotypes in depicting black servants--his Jupiters and Pompeys--cannot be denied; that he complicated these stereotypes with veiled, subversive implications, however, gives his fiction peculiar relevance to the task of historicizing racial attitudes in antebellum culture. Was Poe an unabashed proslavery apologist, a careerist who avoided racial politics, a "gradualist" who hoped slavery would just disappear, or an ideological chameleon? Were Poe's views on race extreme or unusual? Overtly, in tales such as "The Gold-Bug," "The Journal of Julius Rodman," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and covertly in such works as "The Black Cat" and "Hop-Frog," Poe alternately caricatured and demonized the racial Other, yet he often endowed such figures with shrewdness and resourcefulness, at times portraying their defiance as inevitable and even understandable. In Romancing the Shadow, leading interpreters of nineteenth-century American literature and culture debate Poe's role in inventing the African of the white imagination. Their readings represent an array of positions, and while they reflect some consensus about Poe's investment in racialized types and tropes, they also testify to the surprising ways that race embedded itself in his work--and the diverse conclusions that can be drawn therefrom.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. vi)
• Abbreviations (p. ix)
• Introduction Poe, Race, and Contemporary Criticism (p. xi)
• Notes (p. xviii)
• Romancing the Shadow (p. 2)
• Chapter 1 Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism (p. 3)
• Notes (p. 35)
• Chapter 2 Poe and the Racial Imaginary (p. 41)
• Notes (p. 70)
• Chapter 3 Edgar Allan Poe's Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier (p. 75)
• Notes (p. 100)
• Chapter 4 Poe, Persons, and Property (p. 106)
• Notes (p. 121)
• Chapter 5 Black, White, and Gold (p. 127)
• Notes (p. 154)
• Chapter 6 Detection and Racialization in "the Murders in the Rue Morgue" (p. 157)
• Notes (p. 176)
• Chapter 7 Amalgamation Discourses and the Race Riots of 1838 in Poe's Philadelphia (p. 177)
• Notes (p. 200)
• Chapter 8 Reading Racism in the Tales (p. 205)
• Notes (p. 221)
• Chapter 9 Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery (p. 225)
• Notes (p. 255)
• Bibliography (p. 259)
• Contributors (p. 277)
• Index (p. 279)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (CH, Oct'92), Toni Morrison wrote that "no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe." This comment is the reason for Romancing the Shadow. Kennedy and Weissberg have gathered nine essays that examine Poe's attitudes toward race in his writing. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Poe seems to have accepted without question the racial standards and divisions of his day. He depicted racial stereotypes in such characters as Jupiter and Pompey, and in a number of his most famous tales (e.g., "The Gold-Bug," "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," and "The Black Cat"). Poe demonized and caricatured blacks. Nevertheless, as this volume points out, Poe also often portrayed blacks' intelligence and their understandable resistance to white control through occasional subversive behavior. This title also examines Poe's poetry for its implied and frequently overt expression of the beauty of whiteness standing in sharp contrast to the fear, evil, and disgust associated with blackness. As a group, the essays approach their subject from diverse historical and theoretical approaches and offer a brilliant dialog on 19th-century culture, Poe, and race. All undergraduates collections. P. J. Ferlazzo Northern Arizona University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

J. Gerald Kennedy is at Louisiana State University. Liliane Weissberg is at University of Pennsylvania.