Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings - Paperback

by Alexandra Urakova (Editor)

Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a "cryptographic imagination." Not only was Poe's work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe's acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the "undercurrent of meaning" ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe's art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe's engagement in the major discourses of the time--religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe's debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe's texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection--"The Gold Bug," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales.

Author Biography

Alexandra Urakova works as a senior researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and she is associate professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Russia, Moscow. She is the author of The Poetics of the Body in the Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (2009, in Russian).