Romancing the shadow : Poe and race / edited by J. Gerald Kennedy & Liliane Weissberg.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-275) and index.

Average racism: Poe, slavery, and the wages of literary nationalism / Terence Whalen -- The poetics of whiteness: Poe and the racial imaginary / Betsy Erkkila -- Edgar Allan Poe's imperial fantasy and the American frontier / John Carlos Rowe -- Poe, persons, and property / Joan Dayan -- Black, white, and gold / Liliane Weissberg -- Presence of mind: detection and racialization in "The murders in the Rue Morgue" / Lindon Barrett -- "The murders in the Rue Morgue": amalgamation discourses and the race riots of 1838 in Poe's Philadelphia / Elise Lemire -- Poe's philosophy of amalgamation: reading racism in the tales / Leland S. Person -- "Trust no man": Poe, Douglass, and the culture of slavery / J. Gerald Kennedy.

Print version record.

Edgar Allen Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century Southerner, Poe was a deeply ambiguous figure, evading race issues while living among them, and traversing the North-South border with little sensitivity to its political implications. In this tightly organized volume, a handful of leading Americanists revisit the Poe issue, re-examining what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.

English.

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