Innocent of subjectivity and unimpressed by symbolism, youths find in Poe’s universe the same strangeness that astonishes them in their own. We later teach ourselves to see Poe as otherworldly for fear that what he says about the world might actually be true. Until we can learn once more to read the world back into Poe, we cannot read him seriously at all.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

DESPITE the many printings of Poe’s tales, there are few major controversies concerning his texts. This edition reprints from the standard (at present the only) complete edition of Poe: the ‘Virginia’ edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902). I have checked these texts against the magisterial edition of the tales by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ii: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, and iii: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). I have also consulted Patrick Quinn’s edition for the Library of America, Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), which—with its companion, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson—constitutes the most complete readily available edition. Since this edition is intended as a reading text, I have silently corrected errors in Poe’s spelling and punctuation of foreign languages, which previous editors left unchanged. All footnotes within the text are Poe’s own.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions

The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, the ‘Virginia’ edition, 17 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902).

Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ii: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, and iii: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984).

Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984).

Biography

Quinn, Arthur Hobson, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941).

Silverman, Kenneth, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

Anthologies

Budd, Louis J., and Cady, Edwin H. (eds.), On Poe: The Best from American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Carlson, Eric W. (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970).

Muller, John P., and Richardson, William J. (eds.), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimoreg and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

Rosenheim, Shawn, and Rachman, Stephen (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Silverman, Kenneth (ed.), New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Criticism

Benjamin, Walter, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 155–200.

Byer, Robert, ‘Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe’s “Man in the Crowd”’ in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.), Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221–46.

Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); repr. in Rosenheim and Rachman, The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, 3–36.

Davidson, Edward H., Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).

Dayan, Joan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

——‘Romance and Race’ in Emory Elliot (ed.), The Columbia Literary History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109.

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Le Facteur dc la Vérité’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans.