Awards
- Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2015
- Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2015 (United States)
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Dr Robert T. Tally Jr. (Texas State University, USA)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions:
Width: 15.30cm
, Height: 1.10cm
, Length: 23.40cm
Weight: 0.399kg
ISBN: 9781623564278
ISBN 10: 1623564271
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 13 March 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Not since Louis Renza's important revisionary study, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, and the Poetics of American Privacy (2002), has there been a book devoted to Poe (in whole or in part) and his place in the institution of American Literature like Robert T. Tally Jr.' s Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique. And Tally's book, solely on Poe, has the advantage of being able to demonstrate for the entire career how Poe systematically subverts the exceptionalist myth of America's manifest destiny via his fiction, criticism, and poetry. No other study has achieved such a depth and scope of critical demonstration with respect to Poe, going back even further, perhaps, for decades. It is very likely to shake up American Studies, as well as rightly to put Poe and his all-encompassing irony once again at the symbolic heart of modern literature. One of the best books I have read in a long time. -- Daniel T. O'Hara, Professor of English and Humanities, College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, USA Theoretically rich and empirically compelling, Tally's study makes a knock-down case for Poe the Descendentalist: anti-American unmaker of epistemologies, cities, democracies, missions, selves, narratives. Reading across a wide range of literary genres, Tally conjures up a subterranean Poe, nomadic Poe, oceanic Poe, Deleuzian Poe, streetwalking Poe, slyly calling the poete maudit back from his premature burial to erupt in an afterlife of perverse joyous mockery. This study forever makes the stately apparatus of American Studies fall back into the worldly maelstrom of Poe's uncanny figurations. -- Rob Wilson, Professor of Literature, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA Poe and the Subversion of American Literature makes an important contribution to both classic and ongoing conversations about what might constitute a national literature in the United States. Robert Tally explores what is anti-American in Poe's opposition to conventional notions of national self-formation. In Poe's spirit of prankishness, Tally provocatively argues in this fascinating and accessible book, we see satire and mockery as the best elements of an American literary tradition. -- Hester Blum, Associate Professor of English, Penn State University, USA Robert Tally's brilliant new book on Poe restores him to his prominent place in the development of American literature and honors his transgressive achievement. Tally is not just an astute critic but also a wonderful, finely honed writer, and his book will be required reading for Poe scholars and fans alike. -- David Greven Associate Professor of English Department of English University of South Carolina, USA
Author Information
Author Website: http://uweb.txstate.edu/~rt25/
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA, where he teaches American and world literature.
