What is it about?
The article sets up a six-step model that finds (or constructs) a coherent historical narrative leading critics through a series of shifts of critical framework and assumptions.
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Why is it important?
At the time, nearly four decades ago, it was a useful way of organizing the critical response to Poe--specifically, to Poe's brilliantly odd novel. I heard David Ketterer found it useful 8-10 years later--gave a conference talk drawing heavily on it.
Perspectives
I wrote the paper for a graduate seminar in ancient theory taught by Charles Altieri at the University of Washington. The assignment was actually to pick two five-year periods of critical response to a single literary work and compare them, but there was so little Pym criticism before 1950 that I decided to take all of it. I was working on my dissertation on the end of the world in American literature--defended in 1983, the year after this piece was published, and published by Johns Hopkins in 1985 as American Apocalypses--and Poe was already, in my first semester in the PhD program, the central figure.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reading Poe's Novel: A Speculative Review ofPymCriticism, 1950-1980, Poe Studies, December 1982, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-6095.1982.tb00083.x.
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