Notes

1 Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets: ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Sources,” American Literature 34 (1962), pp. 8-30. I add here my grateful acknowledgment of the scholarship in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. Although I have not used the text, I have also often found helpful the annotations by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston: Twayne, 1981; vol. 1: Imaginary Voyages.

2 A fine overview of Gothicism is Devendra Prasad Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, London: Arthur Barker, 1957. I assess Dunlap’s imitating of American literary Gothicism in my “William Dunlap, American Gothic Dramatist,” in Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest 17 (1988), pp. 167-190. See also Clark Griffith’s “Poe and the Gothic,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 127-133; and my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91. Especially good on many points concerning Poe is editor Richard P. Benton’s The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts, a special double number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18:1 & 2 (1972). Benton’s introductory overview, “The Problems of Literary Gothicism,” sets forth excellent perceptions on American Gothicism from its early manifestations to the later twentieth century.

3 Dennis W. Eddings, “Theme and Parody in ‘The Raven’,” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990, pp. 209-217.

4 The best overview of this project is Alexander Hammond’s “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833 Tales of the Folio Club,” in Poe Studies 5 (December 1972), pp. 25-32; and his “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (December 1975), pp. 38-42. See also my The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Alcoholism in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978.

5 Strangely, Mabbott—in Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 238—is reluctant to credit this tale with any value, citing in support Robert Louis Stevenson’s denigration dating from 1875. A more convincing critique is Louis A. Renza’s “Poe’s King: Playing it Close to the Pest,” in Edgar Allan Poe Review 2:2 (2001), pp. 3-18.

6 Such is the argument of Clark Griffith in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” in University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954), pp. 8-25.

7 I assess this technique in “Blackwood Articles à la Poe: How to Make a False Start Pay,” in Perspectives on Poe, edited by D. Ramakrishna, New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996, pp. 63-82.

8 Interestingly—in regard to playing off supernatural and natural—Poe revised what in “The Assignation” had first read as “the Demon of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal” to “the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.” This change eliminates any hint of supernaturalism and substitutes, fittingly, a word that has as its root meanings “creator” and “begetter,” thus deftly preparing for the lack of creativity, artistic or sexual, in old Mentoni as contrasted with both in the Marchesa’s lover, who probably fathered her child.

9 Since racial issues have been connected with Pym so often in recent years, one might profitably consult Randall Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. See especially Kennedy’s “Introduction” and chapters 3, 6, and 7. Noteworthy, too, is Kennedy’s observation: “Distinctly underdeveloped is the literary tradition that portrays interracial relationships that are at least potentially rewarding” (pp. 137-138). Naturally, as a person of his time, Poe would have had conflicts concerning racial issues, and in expressing any thoughts regarding these matters he no doubt would be ambiguous. That Dirk Peters survives when Pym and their Tsalalian hostage do not may register such uncertainties. See also Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591. Joseph V. Ridgely’s assessment of Poe and racism (in which he reminds us that the author of an extremely pro-slavery article in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger was not Poe) should confute more speculative ideas concerning Poe and race. See Ridgely’s “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review’,” in Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20:2 (Fall 1992), pp. 1-3, 6. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 200, 205; and Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, chapters 5 and 6. For earlier worthwhile opinions about Poe’s novel, see G. R. Thompson’s “Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe’s Narrative,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 35:3, 4 (1989), pp. 163-272; and Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe’s debts in Pym to another influential tradition in his day are illuminated by Kent Ljungquist’s The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, chapter 2.

10 A gloss on these masculine-feminine mergings may be found in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, pp. 579-580; 590-591. Also too significant to ignore in light of such a reading is Pym as imp. According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, the word “imp” may derive from the Latin for “to prune,” which led to definitions like “graft,” “repair,” or, in noun form, “bud,” “shoot,” “offspring,” “scion,” and “graft”—all suggestive of growth and development, and thus of Pym’s maturing.

11 For Poe’s sophistications and modifications of literary Gothicism, see my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” pp. 72-91. For later impacts, see three publications of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland: Richard Fusco’s Fin de Millénaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story (1993); Craig Werner’s “Gold Bugs and the Powers of Blackness: Re-Reading Poe” (1995); and my volume of edited essays Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986). On Poe’s international high standing, see Poe Abroad: Influences, Reputation, Affinities, edited by Lois Vines, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.