His two most extended works both subordinate people to place. The novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym uses minimal characterization and disjointed plotting to chart a voyage ‘southward’ into annihilating whiteness. Even more extreme is the late non-fiction Eureka, which entirely discards people and plot to cobble together out of scientific treatises by Newton, Laplace, and eighteenth-century natural theologians a ‘poetic’ account of the formation of the material universe. Such cosmologies and travel narratives only underscore the importance of place or environment throughout the fiction. Poe’s very notion of ‘other worldliness’ is predicated on a strong sense of this one, the physicality of the here and now. In ‘The Domain of Arnheim’, the particular subsumes the abstract; and Poe depicts an aesthetics of the Beautiful and the individuality of the aesthetician entirely through descriptions of a landscape garden. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is scarcely less dependent on setting. Naming in its title not the hero Roderick but the ‘house’ that is both his dwelling and his bloodline, the tale attributes its peculiar ‘atmosphere’ more to the brooding building and its engulfing tarn than to the tormented inhabitants. Given this preoccupation with place, it is not surprising that one of his final publications, ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’, satirizes the very local phenomenon of the California Gold Rush.

Although it is customary to read setting in Poe as the externalization of mental states, it might be more appropriate to read the mental as an internalization of environment. Paradoxically, Poe’s realistic details are often more memorable than his outré effects. Setting ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition may not have made its horror more effective than the less localized Gothicism of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. It does, however, remind his audience that mental anguish has historical as well as psychological sources. As Walter Benjamin explained, ‘The Man in the Crowd’ admirably attributed what elsewhere seemed mere ‘perverseness’ to the alienation and anomie born of industrialization.3 In juxtaposing the symbolism of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ to the social privilege that allowed the elite to flee medieval plagues and nineteenth-century cholera, Poe warns that to emphasize aesthetics over class politics is to repeat as readers that blindness that betrayed Prince Prospero. Even the metaphysics of ‘William Wilson’ are grounded in social reality; and whatever they say about his schizophrenia, the pages on Wilson’s early (mis)development offer great insight into nineteenth-century school-life, fully as moving as anything in David Copperfield or Jane Eyre.

Traditionally viewed as apathetic or even conservative, Poe was in fact intensely political. He rarely focused on specific events, although his allusions to cholera and to the California Gold Rush did challenge the territorial and class assumptions of his generation. More commonly, Poe explored what we have come to call the politics of knowledge—the ways in which the act of knowing structures and controls what can be known. His travel narratives exposed the imperialist motives behind anthropology; and passages like the Tsalal episode of Pym obviously influenced Melville’s more extended critiques of racial politics in Typee and ‘Benito Cereno’. Similarly, his psychological narratives implied the prejudicial character of both what gets known and how it is learned. In his tale of metempsychosis, ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, Poe offers first an isolated image of the Orient, and only afterward identifies the moment as a failed attempt at native self-determination. As a result, readers not only find themselves uncomfortably aligned with British colonialism; they are forced to confront the cultural condescension which allowed the West to appropriate Eastern ideas like reincarnation in the first place.

In the even more ambiguous comic tale ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, the desire to know the mind is literalized as a visit to a French insane asylum. As with Delano’s racism in ‘Benito Cereno’, the narrator’s assumptions about the nature of madness prevent him from realizing that madmen are running the asylum. Poe’s tale, however, goes further to question not only the origins of and cures for madness, but the very project of ‘seeing’ sanity. The French historian Michel Foucault has shown how the asylum reforms of Phillipe Pinel and William Tuke attempted to ‘master’ unreason. So, in Poe’s tale, the very idea of visiting the insane smacked of the same cultural condescension that marred anthropology. Rejecting as self-deceived the narrator’s search for the most efficacious ‘system’, the tale judges all systems as attempts to control rather than to understand, and asks to what the extent the very science of psychology is merely a species of internal tourism.

Similar reservations about the politics of knowing informed Poe’s attitude toward detection. Although Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth employ some of the suspense techniques associated with contemporary mysteries, Poe wrote the first stories to achieve popularity primarily for their ingenious solutions of puzzles. He also employed many of the motifs still common in such stories—the murder in the locked room, the unjustly accused suspect, analysis by psychological deduction, and the complementary solutions of the least likely person and the most likely place. Most important, Poe created in C. Auguste Dupin a model for the detective that continues to dominate mystery writing. Dupin’s eccentric personality and especially his relation to his two foils—a sympathetic but naive narrator, nameless throughout the series, and an unsympathetic professional investigator, the Prefect of Police Monsieur G.—were explicitly reproduced in such detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

Yet despite his invention of the genre, Poe’s mysteries are not traditional tales of detection.