Overview

The popular Poe —The Raven, Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat— has inspired a generation of readers long disenchanted with the normative tradition of American literature. But is the popular Poe—incessantly drinking, drug-addicted, and entranced by the terror of death—the real Poe? Harry Lee Poe contends that, for more than two centuries, the great myth of Edgar Allan Poe has damaged both the popular reader's understanding of Poe's corpus and the historian's depiction of Poe's life. Through reviewing his poems and short stories, literary criticism and science fiction, Evermore reveals a Poe who is deeply confounded by the existence of evil, the truth of justice, and even the problems of love, beauty, and God. Here Poe aficionados and casual appreciators of literature alike are invited into a greater understanding of Poe's most persistent questions and offered a novel approach to reading the American literary icon.

Full Product Details

9781481326391

Table of Contents

Reviews

""The author is at his best when he's tackling Poe's life story and the ways in which it has been distorted. His case against Rufus Griswold's (largely successful) attempt to hijack Poe's reputation after his death is especially compelling, as are his efforts to cut through the mystique and legend to reveal an individual of good manners and strong principles. The portrait that emerges is of a multi-dimensional man who was capable of both experiencing and writing about a full range of emotions—and wasn't merely enthralled with the horrific or grotesque themes for which he's so well remembered."" —Publishers Weekly ""I recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophical and theological approaches to one of America's most widely-recognized but least-understood authors."" — Philip Edward Phillips, Middle Tennessee State University, Renewing Minds

Author Information

Harry Lee Poe is the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University. He is the author of several books, including Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories; The Inklings of Oxford; and What God Knows: Time and the Question of Divine Knowledge.

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