Friday, June 26, 2009

Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race edited by Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg

This collection contains nine chapters on various aspects of race in Poe's work. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is frequently discussed, as are "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug," and "Hop Frog." While the authors have many different views about how Poe works with race (Terence Whalen proposes that Poe espouses an "average racism" and avoid polemics in order to be popular with a large audience, whereas other readers find Poe to be deeply racist and to be taking stances on slavery through readings of stories and texts that aren't explicitly racialized), I found Whalen's, Rowe's (Poe and imperialism), and Kennedy's (Poe and Douglass) chapters to be the most persuasive. Many of the chapters have a strong cultural studies slant and are as much about the antebellum US as they are about Poe. Many chapters also respond to Morrison's Playing in the Dark and the challenges it makes to find the Africanist presence in Poe.

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