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Rose Wright and Eugene Smith's Edgar Allan Poe Tarot follows the basic structure of the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot system. Each of the cards features an illustration by Smith that draws inspiration from and visually adapts an element of Poe's work, depicting imagery, characters, and narrative moments. This tarot deck synthesizes these two distinct and interconnected types of "reading," with the accompanying guide providing both an interpretation of the card's significance drawing on the larger RWS system and critical literary analysis that connects Poe's work to the specific card and its interpretation. The active engagement of reader response presents a wide range of interpretive possibilities and ways of connecting with and responding to Poe's work through visual adaptation and the self-reflection central to the tarot tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have read Edgar Allan Poe as uniquely enmeshed in an interdisciplinary and intermediary web connecting the visual and practical arts. Poe's prose is intrinsically multimodal and multisensory, a transgression of disciplinary boundaries that leads to a horrific affect. This article examines three of Poe's short stories with attention to the figure of the artist, architect, and author within his fiction, arguing that these characters can be read as exemplars of Poe's aesthetic philosophy laid out in "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe pushes and explores the limits of disciplinary boundaries by showing the various conjunctions and conflations inherent to artistic practice. In his stories, Poe explores what distinguishes literature from other creative endeavors. It is his fascination with the porous nature of artistic boundaries that drives both the form and content of his tales—and it is this very liminality, this porousness, that makes them truly the harbingers of horror as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1969, Robert D. Jacobs broke new ground with Poe: Journalist and Critic, the first truly inclusive study of the critical writings that Edgar Allan Poe produced throughout his career. According to Jacobs, those texts could not be understood apart from the journalistic world in which Poe wrote them and without reference to the principles on which he relied while evaluating literary works. Those laws derived from Common Sense philosophy, and of particular importance to Poe, Jacobs argued, was the notion that three faculties—the reason, the moral sense, and the taste—directed mental life. Responsive to pleasure, the taste allowed a person to appreciate art, so Poe's insistence on unity was tied to the belief that all the elements within in a work of literature would please if they had a single, focused effect on the reader. Enlightenment-era psychology was, in short, central to Poe's critical practice, the development of which Jacobs mapped throughout Poe: Journalist and Critic—a work that has become a classic in the field. Attending to Poe's work as a writer for magazines, Jacobs not only stimulated scholarly interest in Poe's critical reviews but also encouraged the examination of his writings as products of nineteenth-century print culture. Seminal in Poe studies, Poe: Journalist and Critic remains useful for anyone who wants to know Poe as he was in life rather than legend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reception of Edgar Allan Poe in modern Persian literature with regard to his fiction and theory of writing. There have been scattered pieces written on Poe's influence on Iranian poets and writers in Persian or English, but this article aims to offer a fairly comprehensive picture of Poe in Iran in general with a focus on his influence or affinities with two leading Iranian authors, Sadeq Hedayat and Sadeq Chubak, as far as female characters are concerned. The article at first surveys how Poe was introduced into Persian literature and then it studies personal, social, political, and historical backgrounds in classical and modern Persian literature that determined men's taking a misogynous approach. A comparative study of representative works of Hedayat and Chubak reveals conscious alignment with Poe's ideas. Confessionary monologues, gloomy atmosphere, and the lack of proper dialogues between men and women mark their writings. The article concludes that although patriarchy has been responsible for these two writers' failures to overcome gender stereotypes, their acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe had its impact on aggravating such tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the psychological interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," trauma theory has yet to make an appearance. However, the confessional nature of the story shifts--via a trauma reading--from an attempt by the narrator to ease his guilt to his attempt to understand what happened to him. "The Black Cat" reveals a man's search to understand how he committed violent acts when trauma and preconceived self-understandings obscure his ability to reconcile his violent actions. The narrator's murder of his wife traumatized him, causing erasures in the timeline and several forms of dissociation. These erasures and dissociations cause an uncanny effect within the story, which show the narrator to be his own doppelganger as well as an instance of the biform. However, these symptoms suggest that the narrator does not have enough critical distance from the events, so telling his tale becomes a form of reliving that does not relieve the confusion he experiences. Ultimately, the narrator's confession does not provide the understanding he hopes for, which places the burden of creating an understanding of the story on the individual reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, "A Narrow Tale," is a creative response to Poe's work. A short story masquerading as a scholarly article with footnotes, "A Narrow Tale" purports to account for the artistic "failure" of Poe's short story "The Premature Burial" with recently unearthed biographical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no doubt that "Berenice" is one of Poe's most disturbing stories; much of this disturbance lies upon its "too horrible" subject--Poe's words--in tune with the aesthetics of the grotesque that were present in certain publications of the nineteenth century. This grotesque component substantially increased the "graphicality" that characterizes Poe's style by attracting the attention of many visual artists, ranging from some renowned illustrators who were Poe's contemporaries, to some popular present-day comic-book artists, including Richard Corben, who provided two original interpretations of the tale. By drawing on a selection of visual renderings of Poe's tale, this study looks at how the grotesque survives throughout all these adaptations, revealing the tale's complexity, and even, in some cases, opening up new possible readings of the text. As will be shown, all these new works result in an interesting array of approaches to the woman protagonist; however, two perspectives have prevailed in the visual interpretation of "Berenice" since the nineteenth century: more idealistic or more grotesque. The final results will always depend on the artists' personal perceptions, but they sometimes have also been determined by certain external circumstances--such as the Comics Code Authority, in the case of comic books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most relevant illustrated editions of Poe's works published in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s are analyzed, with special attention paid to the political circumstances and censorship that affected their production. The relationship between the illustrations and the texts will be interpreted in this light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Tell-Tale Heart" was first published in the premiere issue of the Pioneer, an ambitious and short-lived literary journal edited by James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter. In 2013, a previously unpublished letter from Poe to Lowell, dated November 24, 1842, was auctioned at Christie's and is now in private hands. This letter contains Poe's offer of the tale to Lowell and his first mention of its title to the editor that went on to publish it. This article, based on direct examination of the letter, provides its full text, along with a contextual discussion of the Pioneer's brief existence and an exploration of the relationship between Poe and Lowell from their first correspondence in 1842 to their falling out and mutual criticism in the late 1840s. The newly discovered letter gives us a more complete picture of the publication of one of Poe's best-known tales and of the relationship between two major figures of nineteenth-century American literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Hoffman's evocative motif of seven versions of Poe emphasizes the frequent shifts and transitions in Poe's stories and poems, giving us an author in constant shift and transition. By keeping his own voice prominent in his book and connecting his own struggles and intellectual discoveries with Poe's texts, Hoffman tied his own identity to Poe's, making criticism a form of autobiography and self-expression. Hoffman emphasized Poe's growing interest in metaphysics and cosmology in his later work, and considered Poe's interest in these ideas crucial to an understanding of his philosophy. In "Eureka," sometimes read as a satire, Hoffman focused on Poe's deeply serious tone, and argued that the work was best regarded as a symbolic allegory. Hoffman connected "Eureka" with Poe's inner drives, and analyzed it as a forceful expression of Poe's cosmological vision of a universe bound for an eventual collapse into utterly unified force existing beyond materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a member of the literary community of Nassau Street in New York in the 1840s, Poe achieved many lifelong career goals, benefiting from its many opportunities to achieve prominence through new publication, reflecting relative freedom from didactic restraints and greater toleration for experimentation in subject matter, tone, and aesthetic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When composing his never-published collection of Folio Club tales, Poe read extensively in popular novels of the British "Silver Fork" school. Scholars have explored Poe's repeated borrowings from these works but neglected the significance for the Folio Club design of the infamous London publishing enterprise of Henry Colburn that produced them. This article attempts to clarify that significance in terms of recent scholarship on the marketplace and the political dimensions of Poe's Folio Club project. After initially summarizing traditional approaches, the article demonstrates how new studies of the satires of Andrew Jackson in the collection suggest his administration served as an indirect model for Poe's literary "Junto," then shows how Meredith McGill, Leon Jackson, and J. Gerald Kennedy's recent explorations of the economics and print culture of Poe's literary marketplace offer fresh perspectives on the collection's framestory. The article argues in particular that those perspectives illuminate Poe's use of Henry Colburn's school of Silver Fork novelists as a ready model for the Folio Club itself. Thus Colburn's management of the composition, puffing, and critical reception of his authors' novels evidently provided Poe with a transatlantic example of what Kennedy calls the "system of literary production" represented by the Folio Club. Furthermore, this same scholarship makes clear that the young writer had good reason for seeking such a model abroad: Henry Colburn's marketing of his authors involved the kind of centralized control of literary publishing absent in the decentered, regionally dispersed marketplace Poe faced in the United States of the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edgar Allan Poe's tendency to "borrow" material from contemporaries remains an unsettling fact of his art. Too few studies have lingered, for example, on a striking resemblance between the "bird or devil" of Poe's "The Raven" (1845) and the talking raven named Grip in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), except to say that Poe praised the novel (and especially Grip) in a review for Graham's Magazine. Yet the poem's Dickensian matter provides an ideal gateway to its deeper obsession with creativity itself. Through close reading and historicization, my article recasts "The Raven" as a paranoid allegory of its own quasi-plagiaristic origins. Read against the backdrop of a literary marketplace unchecked by international copyright law, the poem defies both its speaker and us to locate the true source of its strange power. In supposing that his guest learned the word "Nevermore"--so like Grip's cries of "Nobody!"--from "some unhappy master" long ago, the speaker points not only to Dickens (who kept three pet ravens in the course of his life), but also to the raven's entire symbolic provenance, stretching back to Roman myth and beyond. Ultimately, as bird and devil, Poe's raven condemns the futile, even disastrous struggle to isolate any symbol from its prior lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-lost January 3, 1842, essay titled "A Critical Jack Ass" (appearing in the New York Evening Tattler) constitutes a lengthy condemnation of Edgar Allan Poe's Graham's Magazine review of Henry Cockton's novel Stanley Thorn. This newly recovered piece constitutes further evidence of the sometimes overheated response that Poe's frank and incisive critical commentary prompted. The authorship of this piece is unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to show how the academic studies on Poe have been developed during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century in Spain. To achieve this goal, the critical editions of Poe's works published from 2000 on, along with the works of literary criticism composed around Poe's life and works, will be analyzed. The year 2009, with the celebration of Poe's two-hundredth anniversary, was a turning point where many works were produced and many scholars focused on the works of Poe. Many books, articles, and new editions were produced in every research field; but they were not the only ones who made this effort of paying attention to Poe: Spanish students also got involved in some of the activities that took place during this year. Short stories, poems, Poe's life and travels, his influence in later authors on both sides of the Atlantic, and many other aspects were explored. This article will try to offer an overview of all these new publications and how they were received by the Spanish audience, being acquainted the idea that Poe was (and he is still) unknown for most Spaniards, who only have heard of him as an author of horror stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have previously noted Poe's passing references to the long didactic poem De Rerum Natura by the Roman poet Lucretius (ca. 99 BCE-55 BCE). This article asserts much greater significance to Poe's reception of this poem, particularly via a largely overlooked 1805 edition translated and annotated by the English writer John Mason Good (1764-1827). Careful comparative examination reveals the profound degree to which Poe's writings draw on Good's interpretations both in his version of The Nature of Things and his later work of natural theology, Book of Nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poe's tales have been known to elicit responses in readers that range from the critical and incisive to the creative and imaginative. What follows is a purposeful (and playful) illustration of a response to Poe that collapses these very categories of reception. On the one hand, Poe's prose writing persuades readers to practice the kind of logical responsiveness that the author himself embodied in his capacity as a critic, and that the more clear-eyed incarnations among his characters and narrators intermittently model in the sober opposition they offer to the improbable and uncanny. On the other hand, Poe's short fiction can occupy an interpretive position akin to compulsion, crafted as it frequently is to induce readers to relax the defenses with which they would normally meet the author's signature exaggerations. Considering the insinuating appeal of the latter response, we might with some justification consider a telling selection of Poe's stories to qualify as a form of captivity narrative. For in their encounters with these works readers often find that their critical instincts are slowly eroded; they are in consequence left "captive" to a pleasing species of release that depends on their submitting to a determining will other than their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-traveled pun on "Poe" and "poor" is a lens through which the author views depictions of Poe in films ranging from D. W. Griffith's 1909 short to James McTeigue's The Raven (2012). Both early biopics and later films in which Poe is written into a fictional plot rely on the "meme" of Poe being underestimated and unappreciated in his own time, only to be valued highly by later generations of readers. This simplified image of Poe's character and genius corresponds with the great value placed on his literary remains (such as copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems), items valued more highly for having once been overlooked or underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bestowed high praise on the literary achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, describing him in particular as the father of the modern detective story. Doyle's debt to Poe is most evident in the way he modeled Sherlock Holmes on C. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual detective-hero of three of Poe's tales, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter." While comparative analyses of Poe's and Doyle's writings have rightly focused on the likenesses between the detectives in their stories, a striking similarity also exists between two of the cases those detectives investigated. After identifying numerous parallels between Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), the article concludes that Doyle, without ever acknowledging his source, took his novel's basic plot from Poe's short story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 2013, what purported to be a manuscript of "The Conqueror Worm," written entirely in Poe's hand, unexpectedly appeared at auction. Its history was essentially unknown, but there were tantalizing clues that prevented it from being dismissed outright as a forgery. Could it be genuine? An initial examination was inconclusive. Subsequent evaluation of the manuscript, however, not only reveals much about the document itself, and Poe's iconic poem, but also allows an enlightening opportunity to peer into the misty realm of authenticating rare artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent scholarly efforts to link Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" to an exploration of judicial rhetoric and the insanity defense are to be applauded, these efforts have unfortunately misdiagnosed a key element of the insanity defense by treating it as an argument against a charge of insanity rather than an attempt to mitigate a charge of murder. In this article, I first seek to properly contextualize Poe's adept understanding of the nature of the insanity defense within the legal elements of the defense in force during the writing of "The Tell-Tale Heart." I then utilize this understanding by exploring how this analysis gives us insight into the identity of the narrator's audience (i.e., the identity of "you") and the meanings that this identity may give the narrator's haunting question, "but why will you say that I am mad?". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem includes the voices of Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm Poe. His young wife speaks from the dead. When Edgar realized he had no likeness of his wife, he commissioned an artist to paint her portrait-the portrait of her corpse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]