The A. B. C… of Autography: Edgar Allan Poe and Archive Trouble of Antebellum American Literature 公开
Wood, Seth Richard (2011)
Abstract
This dissertation is a reading of a much neglected but wildly
compelling work of Edgar
Allan Poe's in which he analyzes the handwriting of over one
hundred of his
contemporaries-from fellow poets, prose writers and magazinists to
Supreme Court
Justices and one former President-while also furnishing exemplary
specimens of the
handwriting in the shape of a collection of facsimile signatures or
autographs. Given that
this dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Poe's
Autography, its first principal
aim is to build a context in which this highly eccentric work can
be appreciated: to
illustrate its relation to the unique literary climate of
antebellum America, in which it
took shape, and to explore its resonance with the rest of Poe's
idiosyncratic corpus.
While the extraordinary richness and complexity of
Autography makes the way to meet
this aim relatively clear, it also introduces an element of mystery
into this first concerted
effort to give Autography its due. If, as this dissertation
argues, Autography is profoundly
resonant with the rest of Poe's corpus and the historical
moment in which it was
published, then why would it have gone for so long unnoticed and
unread? To the end,
not of definitively answering this question, but of addressing it,
the second principal aim
of this dissertation will be to make the long tradition of
Autography's being of little to no
interest to American literary history a meaningful aspect of the
interpretations of it given
here, while their first impulse is to break with this tradition.
The idea is that this particular
forgotten thing should be remembered first as a forgotten thing if
and when it is going to
have a future.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
A Character-Sketch of Edgar Allan Poe's Autography
Part I:
The Purloined Letter of Autography
The Autography of "The Purloined Letter"
Part II:
The Hoax which is Not One:
Poe's Jeu d'Esprit and the Literary Circle of
Autography
Part III:
The Signature-Architecture of Autography
About this Dissertation
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