REVIEWS

Reviews

Reviews

Edgar Allan Poe

Nineteenth-century readers were far more likely to know Edgar Allan Poe as "tomahawk man," the writer of trenchant, acerbic literary reviews, than for his ghoulish tales or mesmeric poems (Frank, 1997). When Poe became reviewer of the south Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia at the age of 26, his alert reviews—not just of fiction, but furthermore of health publications, almanacs, speeches, journey publications, and other magazines—quickly increased both the status and circulation of the magazine. And he went on to demonstrate this same effect in often-tempestuous stints at publications in Philadelphia and New York. Drawing from the almost one thousand essays, items, reconsiders, columns, and critical notices released during Poe's 14 years of writing to (and occasionally missing) deadline, term papers and reconsiders is the most entire one-volume version of his nonfiction work ever published. Poe's nasty attacks often spawned publication wars and no one gathered more vigilance than when he ascribed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, professor of up to date languages at Harvard and America's most respected poet of the nineteenth century, with recurring examples of plagiarism. The capacity includes more than 100 pages documenting what Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman has called "arguably the longest, strangest, and most-publicized individual war in American scholarly history. “The Tell-Tale Heart” exemplifies perfectly Poe's notion of “unity of effect,” the conviction that every line of a story should assist to a lone, unrelieved effect on the reader.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's prodigious range as well as her prestigious, occasionally notorious, literary career, Gilman's rise as social activist, radical feminist, and prominent figure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American letters, while proposing that her subsequent fall ran concurrently with the onset of modernism: her failure to embrace suffragette agendas, the gradual distancing of her literary voice, and her retention of a positivist aesthetic were un-popular in misanthropic postwar times.

Feminist scholarship has singularly revived "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Gilman's most identified and widely anthologized short article, but this collection's notable goal is to enquire the wideness of Gilman's oeuvre. Its substantive essays on her short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry yield practical and imaginative reinterpretations of Gilman as militant satirist, dedicated humanist, and social theorist (Allen, 2009). This volume begins with a biographical term paper by Carol Ruth Berkin, which examines "The Contradictions" of Gilman's public and private personae, supported by items from Gilman's colleagues and reconsiders of Women and Economics (1898), The Home: ...