Edgar Allan Poe’s literary reputation was founded upon his sarcastic and negative reviews of curr... more Edgar Allan Poe’s literary reputation was founded upon his sarcastic and negative reviews of current books. While Poe’s reviews have been studied for insights into his literary theory and his relation to the culture of periodical publishing, they have rarely been considered as literary works themselves. This essay analyzes the structure and tone of Poe’s earliest “tomahawk”-style reviews in The Southern Literary Messenger and finds that they innovate a new tone of sarcasm, which Poe referred to as “quizzing,” through the adaptation of a primarily textual form of irony. By making fun of prefaces, plots, and grammar, Poe employs a new form of humor that capitalizes on the emergence of print reading as mass culture. Such humor severs letter from spirit not only for the sake of criticism but also to open the practice and pleasure of critical judgment to a popular audience.
Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has vie... more Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has viewed humans as particular sorts of things in a non-hierarchical relation with the universe of things....
Edgar Allan Poe’s literary reputation was founded upon his sarcastic and negative reviews of curr... more Edgar Allan Poe’s literary reputation was founded upon his sarcastic and negative reviews of current books. While Poe’s reviews have been studied for insights into his literary theory and his relation to the culture of periodical publishing, they have rarely been considered as literary works themselves. This essay analyzes the structure and tone of Poe’s earliest “tomahawk”-style reviews in The Southern Literary Messenger and finds that they innovate a new tone of sarcasm, which Poe referred to as “quizzing,” through the adaptation of a primarily textual form of irony. By making fun of prefaces, plots, and grammar, Poe employs a new form of humor that capitalizes on the emergence of print reading as mass culture. Such humor severs letter from spirit not only for the sake of criticism but also to open the practice and pleasure of critical judgment to a popular audience.
Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has vie... more Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has viewed humans as particular sorts of things in a non-hierarchical relation with the universe of things....
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