Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America by Terence Whalen

This book investigates Poe's understanding of and relation to the interaction between capitalist market forces, political economy, and conditions of literary production in the antebellum United States. Whalen is not afraid of making a controversial argument or taking on years of scholarship: in two of his most remarkable assertions, he claims that the accounts of Poe's success at the Southern Literary Messenger are greatly exaggerated (and possibly by Poe himself) and that the controversial Paulding-Dreyton review published in the Southern Literary Messenger was actually the work of William and Mary professor Beverley Tucker, so Poe's racism was not virulent, but rather the "average racism" of the age. Indeed, Whalen contends that Poe was so interested in the potential of a national market for his work, that he worked very hard to create political neutral texts. I agreed with many of the arguments in this book, but I thought Whalen's tone was a touch aggressive and arrogant: he is the only scholar in a hundred and fifty years to make arguments like these and to look at the sources he does! There's also a very strong reading of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.