Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In my 2019 Poe’s Difference I make the case that Poe is most profitably to be considered an anachronistic rather than a precocious author, which is not only to go against the grain of almost all past and contemporary scholarship but also to open up the possibility that the antebellum US popular culture that Poe had as a professional writer to propitiate was as late as the 1830s and 1840s exceptionally backward–in particular where human rights were concerned. I’d like to adumbrate the argument by presenting interpretations of Poe’s “The Scythe of Time: A Predicament,” and “Ulalume” that comprise the book’s Afterword, concluding with a discussion contained in the book’s Introduction of the potential literary, cultural, and historical significance of repositioning Poe as more backward- than foreword-looking.