Edgar Allan Poe and American Democracy

摘要

Edgar Allan Poe was certainly a man of letters. He is, of course, best known for his macabre short stories and poems. Yet Poe wrote much more than just spine-chilling fiction. His literary output includes one novel, one incomplete novel, over 65 short stories, roughly 50 poems, and an extraordinary number of literary criticisms, essays, lectures, and personal correspondences. In fact, Poe's contemporaries probably knew him best as a literary critic. However, what may be less known of Poe is the fact that he was very much a man of the sciences. The corpus of Poe's works includes forays into the fields of psychology, medicine, astronomy, physics, chemistry, aeronautics, geology, meteorology, and biology. Poe often drew on the science of his time to inform his stories, criticisms, and, to a lesser extent, his poems. Yet the areas in which Poe has seemed to attract the most caustic criticism involve his unconventional views towards American Democracy and, more generally, political science. "Edgar Allan Poe and American Democracy" explores and seeks to understand the complexities of Poe's vision of Democracy and more generally politics.