Poe and Place

This collection of fifteen original essays and one original poem explores the theme of “place” in the life, works, and afterlife of Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849). Poe and Place argues that “place” is an important critical category through which to understand this classic American author in new and interesting ways. The geographical “places” examined include the cities in which Poe lived and worked, specific locales included in his fictional works, imaginary places featured in his writings, physical and imaginary places and spaces from which he departed and those to which he sought to return, places he claimed to have gone, and places that have embraced him as their own. The geo-critical and geo-spatial perspectives in the collection offer fresh readings of Poe and provide readers new vantage points from which to approach Poe’s life, literary works, aesthetic concerns, and cultural afterlife.

“If you are a Poe scholar, this volume merits a place not just on your bookshelf (as reviewers often say) but waiting by your bedside or open on your desk. It should inspire fresh readings of familiar texts. … I recommend this volume highly. Happy exploring!” (Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Poe Studies, Vol. 52, 2019)

“Poe and Place is a multidimensional book that will compliment nicely earlier landmark national studies of Poe. It also makes a welcome addition to other recent attempts to place Poe in global literary contexts, and a useful contribution to geo-spatial literary studies.” (Stephen Rachman, Director of the American Studies Program, Michigan State University, USA, and co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995))

“Tracking Poe’s relation to place from the many cities he knew to the imaginatively invested locales of the fiction and poetry, Poe and Place promises to put the longstanding discussion of where Poe belongs on a new and more sophisticated footing. Geographical, biographical, philological and literary-critical scholarship mixes promiscuously and productively in these essays.” (Jonathan Elmer, Professor of English, Indiana University, USA, and author of Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (1995))

“In this book you will follow Poe through many of the places, real and irreal, that his astonishing sensibility half perceived and half created. His itinerant life brought a second discovery of America, and indeed of the Modern World at large, as no country for old men. He was the first American to draw a map of that land of fearful imaginings, which these essays help us to see so much more clearly.” (Jerome McGann, University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA, and author of The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel (2014))

“The essays here show how Poe was shaped by the cities he lived in—including Boston, Richmond, London, Charlottesville, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York—and how places, real and fantastic, figure in his works. In Poe and Place, scholars, teachers, and fans will find both historical specificity and new insights into the imagination that carried Poe, as he put it in ‘Dream-Land’ (1844), ‘out of space [and] out of time.” (Paul Lewis, Professor of English, Boston College, USA, and editor of The Citizen Poets of Boston, A Collection of Forgotten Poems: 1789–1820 (2016))

“Although born in Boston, Poe has long been considered a genteel Southern writer whose works display a fascination with foreign countries and fantastical places. However, he spent the majority of his literary career working in the northeastern publishing centers of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. Is Poe a literary ‘nowhere man,’ an all-American writer, or a prophet of world literature? This collection of insightful essays is a critical mystery tour to the center of Poe’s wonderful planet.” (Takayuki Tatsumi, Professor of English, Keio University, Japan, and author of Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (2018) and Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (2006))

“Bringing together a company of established and rising scholars, Philip Edward Phillips gives us a valuable collection of essays on a subject not previously explored with such concentrated attention—and the richly varied results bear out the choice of focus. That Poe’s relations to place, whether in life or in text, whether geographical or imaginative, have a special tendency to tease and elude us makes for a provocative project.” (Jana Argersinger, Washington State University, USA, coeditor of Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation (2013) and Poe Writing/Writing Poe and Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (2014))

“With an exciting mix of established and younger scholars, and tracking Poe’s relation to place from the many cities he knew to the imaginatively invested locales of the fiction and poetry, Poe and Place promises to put the longstanding discussion of where Poe belongs on a new and more sophisticated footing. Geographical, biographical, philological and literary-critical scholarship mixes promiscuously and productively in these essays.” (Jonathan Elmer, Professor of English, Indiana University, USA, and author of Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (1995))

Philip Edward Phillips is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the University Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is a Past President of the Poe Studies Association.