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They say Poe’s ghost hangs out on the front steps
12:05 pm on March 7th, 2008 by Dave Segal
…of the
Athenaeum:
Fri, 3/7, 5-7pm: SALON – The Grimke Address/Meanwhile, At That Same Moment… part 5: Athenaeum Program Director Christina Bevilacqua on Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1838.
Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was published in 1838. While starting out with familiar Poe themes of claustrophobia and hallucinatory terror tipping into madness, it soon opens out to the high seas, piracy, shipwreck, cannibalism, polar exploration, theories of hollow earth, war with malevolent “natives” and other agoraphobia-inducing and increasingly fantastical incidents.
In an era when Westerners were making their way into formerly unfamiliar areas of the globe, how does Poe’s fevered travelogue fit into the literary and navigational accounts of the day? For Athenaeum members and their guests.
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