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Nonreasoning Creatures

Paul Grimstad

in Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses

This chapter analyzes how Poe invented the analytic detective story, and links this to Charles Peirce’s notion of the abductive inference. It considers the relation of Poe and Peirce to artificial ... More

This chapter analyzes how Poe invented the analytic detective story, and links this to Charles Peirce’s notion of the abductive inference. It considers the relation of Poe and Peirce to artificial intelligence, before looking closely at Poe’s poem “The Raven”, and the essay explaining that poem’s composition, “The Philosophy of Composition”Less

The Southern Origins of Bohemian New York: Edward Howland, Ada Clare, and Edgar Allan Poe

Edward Whitley

in Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk

The first Americans to identify as artistic bohemians gathered at a Manhattan beer cellar in the 1850s. They counted Walt Whitman as one of their number, and considered Edgar Allan Poe a bohemian ... More

The first Americans to identify as artistic bohemians gathered at a Manhattan beer cellar in the 1850s. They counted Walt Whitman as one of their number, and considered Edgar Allan Poe a bohemian avant la letter. But New York’s first bohemians were not displaced Parisians living in a section of the Latin Quarter magically transplanted to the United States. Rather, bohemianism in the United States has roots in Charleston, South Carolina, the hometown of both Ada Clare (the “Queen of Bohemia” and host of a weekly literary salon) and Edward Howland (the financial backer for the bohemians’ literary weekly, The New York Saturday Press), as well as in the setting of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843), which influenced the first literary representation of American bohemianism in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Bohemian” (1855). Charleston’s cotton plantations provided Howland and Clare with the money to fund the institutions that were essential for bohemianism to flourish: the periodical and the salon. With Poe at the imaginative center of American bohemia and Clare and Howland at its financial center, U.S. bohemianism emerges as a complex network of people, money, and ideas circulating between the North and the South as well as New York and Paris.Less

A Plague upon Your House

Nicholas P. Money

in Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores: A Natural History of Toxic Mold

This chapter considers other fungi that grow in buildings. Meruliporia incrassata has become a frequent problem in California, where its massive rootlike organs, called rhizomorphs, snake into homes ... More

This chapter considers other fungi that grow in buildings. Meruliporia incrassata has become a frequent problem in California, where its massive rootlike organs, called rhizomorphs, snake into homes and destroy their timber frames. Serpula lacrymans causes dry rot in Europe and has plagued buildings and wooden ships for hundreds of years. Samuel Pepys was exasperated by the effects of dry rot on the Royal Navy in the 17th century, and Thomas Faraday sought a “cure” for this fungus in the 19th century. Dry rot appeared in the writings of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe, and is also mentioned in Leviticus. A microbial menace, called the artillery fungus, that uses a miniature cannon to shoot its black spore-filled balls onto new food sources is described. This extraordinary feat of biomechanics causes this fungus to spatter itself onto automobiles, serving as yet another fungal stimulus for lawsuits.Less

Problematic Graves, Tourism, and the Wishes of Survivors

in Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials

Many significant exhumation episodes in America involved not only statesmen and warriors, founders and fallen heroes, but also legendary figures, especially in literature and the arts—for example, ... More

Many significant exhumation episodes in America involved not only statesmen and warriors, founders and fallen heroes, but also legendary figures, especially in literature and the arts—for example, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Rothko. Beyond exhumation and reburial, or the restoration of a neglected gravesite, these people have something in common: their civic and personal survivors (particularly mothers and spouses) argued that the deceased had either not been interred in the most appropriate location or not interred properly, or that the deceased had really wanted to be buried in a spot other than the one initially chosen. With some notable exceptions, graves of figures such as Jesse James, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Daniel Boone were not disinterred because their reputations as historically significant individuals changed. There are cases when opening or moving graves, or else erecting new and more imposing monuments, enhanced reputations and revived interest in the individuals' careers and contributions to American life and culture. Boone's reburial was particularly a bitterly contested episode. Pilgrims, disciples, and curiosity seekers have played key roles in prompting reinterment.Less

The Fall of the House of Musgrave

Andrew Glazzard

in The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle's Detective Fiction

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the ... More

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.Less

After the Fact: Spectral Evidence, Cultural Haunting, and Gothic Sensibility

Eamonn Carrabine

Michael Fiddler, Theo Kindynis, and Travis Linnemann (eds)

in Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most celebrated of the early American Gothic writers, haunting not only modern art but also continental philosophy. Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s short story “The Purloined ... More

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most celebrated of the early American Gothic writers, haunting not only modern art but also continental philosophy. Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” opened up a radically new conception of psychoanalysis (by highlighting the dynamic of mis-seeing in the tale, thus offering an instance of how the gaze operates), which in turn provoked Derrida’s critical deconstruction of Lacan’s reading of the text. It is no accident that their dispute revolves around a crime story (a robbery and its undoing), and in all three pieces it is the very act of analysis that occupies center stage. What is striking, and one of the points of departure for this chapter, “is the connection between Poe’s writings and those kinds of art which, since the 1960s, have adopted site, architecture and interior as their media” where his “obsession with interiors and their destruction—the Gothic core of his writing—is a constant, unspoken presence in this art” (Jones, 2000/2007:209). Drawing on these artists and theorists, the chapter will bring into focus the question of time (as foregrounded in Derrida’s concept of hauntology) so as to explore the idea of spectral evidence.Less

Conclusion

Wendy Gonaver

in The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880

The conclusion opens with discussion of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather,” a satire of moral treatment. Poe was a distant cousin of Superintendent John M. Galt, and he ... More

The conclusion opens with discussion of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather,” a satire of moral treatment. Poe was a distant cousin of Superintendent John M. Galt, and he might have based his fictional institution on the Eastern Lunatic Asylum, particularly his depiction of the attendants as African apes. This story provides an opportunity to review the ideals and shortcomings of moral therapy, and to connect the history of psychiatry to analysis of race. It is asserted that racial antipathy undermined humane asylum care and stalled implementation of successful outpatient care models. Instead, moral medicine gave way to moral hygiene and eugenics as asylum and prison moved closer together. The conclusion ends with a brief discussion of psychiatrist Franz Fanon, who drew upon his professional experiences to outline a different asylum nightmare than that envisioned by Poe.Less

Mid-Century Adaptations, or Albedo

Theodore Ziolkowski

in The Alchemist in Literature: From Dante to the Present

The growing popularity of alchemy as a metaphor led to the adaptation of the alchemist in novels and plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, in all of which the alchemist’s noble ambition or lust for gold ... More

The growing popularity of alchemy as a metaphor led to the adaptation of the alchemist in novels and plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, in all of which the alchemist’s noble ambition or lust for gold reduces his initial genius to ignominy and ridicule. Similarly, in the Austrian Friedrich Halm’s drama The Adept the alchemist’s obsession with the great secret of nature is misconstrued by society and gradually transformed into a lust for power. Like their French and German contemporaries, Poe and Hawthorne introduced the figure of the alchemist into their stories to show how his initially noble obsession could be perverted and lead to the destruction of those around him and his own dismay. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Mary Anne Atwood, whose personal practice of alchemy produced her remarkable work A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery.Less

National Scandal

Karen L. Cox

in Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South

This chapter explores the national media attention associated with this case. Because the case took place after the first pilgrimage of homes in Natchez, stark contrasts were made between the Old ... More

This chapter explores the national media attention associated with this case. Because the case took place after the first pilgrimage of homes in Natchez, stark contrasts were made between the Old South and the gothic South represented by Dana, Dockery, and Glenwood. The press nicknamed Dana the “Wild Man,” Dockery as the “Goat Woman,” and Glenwood as “Goat Castle.” Descriptions of Goat Castle and photographs of the interior were shared nationwide, which caused journalists to make analogies with Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” The scandal was that the Old South Grandeur represented by the pilgrimage was a distraction from the squalor of Goat Castle.Less