The German face of Edgar Allan Poe: A study of literary references in his works

Product Description In Western culture, women are often linked with death, perhaps because they are traditionally constructed as an unknowable "other." The first two Women and Death volumes investigate ideas about death and the feminine as represented in German culture since 1500, focusing, respectively, on the representation of women as victims and killers and the idea of the woman warrior, and confirming that women who kill or die violent or untimely deaths exercise fascination even as they pose a threat. The traditions of representation traced in the first two volumes, however, are largely patriarchal. What happens when it is women who produce the representations? Do they debunk or reject the dominant discourses of sexual fascination around women and death? Do they replace them with more sober or "realistic" representations, with new forms, modes, and language? Or do women writers and artists, inescapably bound up in patriarchal tradition, reproduce its paradigms? This third volume in the series investigates these questions in ten essays written by an international group of expert scholars. It will be of interest to scholars and students of German literature and culture, Women's Studies, and film studies. Contributors: Judith Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Jill Bepler, Stephanie Bird, Abigail Dunn, Stephanie Hilger, Elisabeth Krimmer, Aine McMurtry, Simon Richter, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Clare Bielby is Lecturer in German at the University of Hull. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. Review The issue of Poe's competence in the field of German language and literature is central to understanding his creative method. For over one hundred years readers have been intrigued by the spate of references to German literature in his works, by scoffs at German scholarship, and by his extensive use of quotations in German to embellish his texts. Did Poe actually speak or read this language? Did he know Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann in the original? Could he read Schlegel and Kant in German well enough for these fingers to have directly influenced his aesthetics? Definitive answers to such questions are long overdue. The German Face Of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study Of Literary References In His Works sorts through Poe's Germanic references to understand his complex connection with German language, literature and culture. It examines his quotations and his statements about German writers. The conclusions are straightforward: Poe's knowledge of the German language and its culture represented a second-hand familiarity of phrases and opinions that he found entirely in English-language sources. The conclusions of this study are significant, for they correct a tradition of time-worn assumptions within Poe scholarship. The German Face Of Edgar Allan Poe is a masterpiece of original literary scholarship and research. -- Midwest Book Review About the Author Thomas S. Hansen is professor of German at Wellesley College.