Robert T. Tally Jr.

Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (eBook, ePUB)

Satire, Fantasy, Critique

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014

In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 160
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Januar 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781623569709
• Artikelnr.: 48421240

Autorenporträt

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of many books, including The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (2023); For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (2022); J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: Realizing History Through Fantasy (2022); Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013); Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel (2011); and Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (2009). The translator of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), Tally is also the editor or co-editor of Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora (2022); Spatial Literary Studies in China (2022); Spatial Literary Studies (2020); Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018); The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017); Ecocriticism and Geocriticism (2016); The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015); Literary Cartographies (2014); Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2013); and Geocritical Explorations (2011). Tally is the general editor of "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," a Palgrave Macmillan book series.