Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle

Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries. Richards demonstrates that he staged his performance of tortured isolation in the salons and ephemeral publications of New York City in conjunction with prominent women poets whose work sought to surpass. She introduces and interprets the work of three important and largely forgotten women poets: Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Richards re-evaluates the work of these writers, and of nineteenth-century lyric practices more generally, by examining poems in the context of their circulation and reception within nineteenth-century print culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of American print culture as well as specialists of nineteenth-century literature and poetry.

• The first study to place Poe’s work in relation to the women writers of his time • Sheds light on the production and reception of the lyric in the context of nineteenth-century American print culture • Will be of interest to Poe specialists and nineteenth-century literature scholars generally

Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Note on texts used; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. ‘The poetess’ the Poe’s performance of the feminine; 2. Frances Sargent Osgood, Salon poetry, and the erotic voice print; 3. Sarah Helen Whitman, spiritualist poetics, and the ‘Phantom Voice’ of Poe; 4. Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s ‘Unspeakable Eloquence’; Coda: the raven’s return.

\'… meticulously researched. Richards has drawn together an impressive amount of detail about the social networks and gendered values of the literary marketplace governing the transmission of poetry in nineteenth-century America. … the book will appeal broadly to beginning as well as advanced readers in gender studies, women\'s literary history and American cultural studies.\' Journal of American Studies