Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film

ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies, 2018

The relationship between Jorge Luis Borges' and Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction has attracted the attention of several literary critics over the past twenty-five years (Irwin, Bennett, and various others). This conversation, however, pays little attention to Poe's significant presence in Borges' literary criticism from the 1920s through 1986. This essay examines Borges' literary relationship with Poe as seen in Borges' literary criticism-articles, lectures, bookreviews, prologues, and interviews-and in various archival manuscripts and notations that Borges left behind. These materials demonstrate that Borges perennially re-read Poe and that his references to Poe's work shifted Poe's reputation in the Río de la Plata region and throughout Spanish America from poet to fiction writer. in Hispanic Literature thoroughly explores Poe's influence on and affinities with both Iberian and Spanish American writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through the early 1930s, and Englekirk repeatedly demonstrates how Poe's Spanish American reputation rests firmly on his poetry in contrast to his Spanish reputation which favors his fiction. As I have argued elsewhere, however, Poe's image in Spanish America has significantly shifted toward his fiction since the middle of the twentieth century (Esplin, 2006: 32-33). This reputation shift is closely connected to the literary criticism and fictional work of famous Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges.

Literary influence, recursive and precursive: Poe, Kafka, Borges, Bloom and apostrophic anxieties.

The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2016

2018

Poe remains one of the most misread A merican writers. The slanders of his first biographer created a black legend that critics and poets have been trying to dispel for more than a century since. Although widely read, his popularity turned against him and many critics concurred with T.S. Eliot that he was merely a litterateur for teenagers, whose intellect was that "of a h ighly g ifted young person before puberty" (35). In his t ime, Poe was considered iconoclastic, yet he was just another High Ro mantic who assumed the role of an A merican Coleridge. Emerson called h im "the jingle man," Russell considered his work to be "two-fifths sheer fudge" (141-42) and Henry James condescended that "enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflect ion" (280). In the twentieth century, Matthiessen omitted Poe in his monu mental American Renaissance (1941) while Yvor Winters censured his incoherence and obscurantism. Nevertheless, it should be said that the crit ics who fell under the influence of the New Critics produced one of the fines t interpretations of his texts. In many ways , Poe is the twin brother with a dark face, the "dejected cousin" (Tate 38-50) of the ontologically optimistic "party of hope," the new American Adams-Emerson, Whit man, Thoreau-, who believed in progress, man ifest destiny, and man's god-like greatness. Writing at a time when Emerson postulated that evil was non-substantive, Poe philosophized on the power of darkness and the dangers of the hubris of man's indo mitable will. Together with Hawthorne and Melv ille, he warned against the dangers of self-reliance and of the self-made man (Lewis, Patea). Haro ld Bloo m concluded as late as 1987 that "Emerson fathered pragmatis m; Poe fathered nothing" (5). However, as a poet and critic Poe is the founding father of Sy mbolism, Aestheticism and Decadentism. He is responsible for the birth o f the short story as a literary fo rm, wh ich is arguably America's characteristic literary genre (May 69). As a short story writer he invented the short story and the detective, mystery and horror

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

YE WHO READ are still among the living; but I . . . shall have long gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, . . . and there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt. "Shadow -A Parable"1 On February 2, 2009, 1 participated in a radio program that dealt with Poe's life and works. The thirty-minute program was broadcast throughout Spain. There were five guests: writer Santiago Roncagliolo, Dr. Beatriz González, two postgraduate students, and me (the latter four from the University of Castilla-La Mancha).2 As Poe scholars, we had been invited because one day later the international conference, "Edgar Allan Poe: Two Hundreds Years Later," was going to start at the university.3 Roncagliolo had been invited to participate in the radio broadcast because he wrote an appreciation of 'The Pit and the Pendulum" for a new edition of Poe's tales, published last year in Spain. The interview had been organized because three weeks earlier the bicentennial of Poe's birth had taken place. The questions were the typical ones: why Poe? why Albacete? who were the main speakers? where were they from? which institutions contributed? There arose, of course, the issue of drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex. Ionce moreexplained that there is neither proof of his addiction to drugs nor any proof of his practicing any type of sexual misconduct. I was highly surprised when both the host and Roncagliolo said they preferred to think of Poe as a lunatic, an alcoholic and a drug abuser. To them Poe seemed to be a far more interesting figure in that way than if he had been a "normal" person. These have been the general assumptions regarding Poe in Spain and South America for well over a hundred years, and that is what I propose to discuss here: the reasons for these distortions.

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 2021

Canons is the last addition to the vast Poe scholarship developed and published by Lehigh University Press (within their collection Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe). After other similar titles such as Translated Poe (edited by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato) or Poe's Pervasive Influence (edited by Barbara Cantalupo), among others, this volume comes to complete the comprehension of the global impact of Edgar Allan Poe and his works. The volume we are reviewing here is divided into four different sections, covering respectively the earlier anthologies of Poe's works during the 1840s, the collections that have been produced in the US, the UK, and the Anglophone context in general, specific anthologies based on genre and format, and how Poe has been anthologized in foreign contexts. By choosing such a division, the editors have been capable of collecting and addressing the most relevant perspectives considered by contemporary Poe scholars from different points of the planet. Within the first mentioned section of the book, three chapters are included. The first of them (by Jana L. Argersinger) opens, as probably could not be done otherwise, with the labor Poe developed as editor of anthologies when working in different literary magazines, but also on how Griswold and Osgood contributed to coin a

2012

The Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza, who defined fiction as " the combining exercise of elements taken from tradition and put to work for story, " blends in his novels elements belonging to the detective and Gothic genres with the ultimate purpose of subverting them through satire. It is my purpose here to prove that one of Mendoza's referents is Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales and poems he affirms to have read at different points in his life. He overtly expressed his opinion about the American author who, he stated, deserves the highest praise for being the founder of the detective story genre and for the poetic atmosphere he created in his tales of mystery. This article is aimed at tracing the presence of E. A. Poe's works in Edu-ardo Mendoza's El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato (2008), where echoes of several of Poe's tales and poems can be seen.