Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

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Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe’s connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe’s ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe’s invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers Cover Half Title Title Copyrights Contents Permissions Acknowledgments Introduction: Dreams and Mystifications of Poe Part One The Quixotic Quest for Literary Fame, Financial Stability, and a Republic of Letters in Antebellum America 1 Poor Edgar’s Almanac: E. A. Poe’s Money Woes 2 Outside Looking In: Poe and New York City 3 Eddy P., the Scrivener: Biography and Autobiography in Herman Melville’s “Story of Wall-Street” Part Two The Competition in Cunning: Ramifications of and Responses to Poe’s Ratiocinative Tales 4 Character Rivalry, Authorial Sleight of Hand, and Generic Fluidity in the Dupin Trilogy 5 Varieties of Detection in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter , Walt Whitman’s Life and Adventures of Jack Engle , Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno , and Mark Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant” 6 Madness, Mystification, and “Average Racism” in “The Gold-Bug,” E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand , Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , and Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter Coda: “A Crime of Dark Dye”: Misreading Poe’s Criticism Notes Index