Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) has long occupied the position of literary outsider. Dismissed as unrepresentative of the main currents of antebellum culture, Poe commented incisively—in fiction and nonfiction—on nationalism, science, materialism, popular taste, and cultural ideology. Opposing the pressure to write nationalistic “American” tales or from a restricted New England perspective, he produced a body of work held in greater international esteem than that of any of his U.S. contemporaries.

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of nineteenth and twentieth century American short fiction and an expert on the works of Poe, Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald. His other books include A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, and Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity.

Jerome McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia and Visiting Research Scholar at the University of London and the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored and edited numerous books, including Towards a Literature of Knowledge, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, and The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World.

Links for Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe’s prose prompts professor’s presentation (The Advocate)

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