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The Edgar A. Poe Bicentennial Symposium (1809 - 2009)
"Rethinking the Center, Remapping the Culture: Poe and the American Renaissance"

The Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture and the Department of English at the University of Virginia announce a symposium of leading scholars working in the area of Poe Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Literature for discussion of the following topic: "Rethinking the Center, Remapping the Culture: Poe and the American Renaissance." Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan University Professor of English (UVa), and J. Gerald Kennedy, the William A. Read Professor of English (LSU), will chair the symposium. Professor Kennedy has been invited to the Harrison Institute as a Lillian Gary Taylor Visiting Fellow in American Literature in Spring 2009.

Other participating scholars are:  Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia), Betsy Erkkila (Northwestern University), Jennifer Greeson (University of Virginia), Leon Jackson (University of South Carolina), J. Gerald Kennedy (Louisiana State University), Maurice Lee (Boston University), Eric Lott (University of Virginia), Jerome McGann (University of Virginia), Scott Peeples (College of Charleston), Leland Person (University of Cincinnati), and Eliza Richards (University of North Carolina).

Intellectual Focus
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe invites a reexamination of the author’s lasting, worldwide significance. Arguably the best known, most instantly recognizable U.S. writer before 1850, Poe has nevertheless long occupied a problematic position in the history of the so-called American Renaissance. Dismissed as a writer of problematic achievement, an alien presence outside the main currents of antebellum culture, Poe was in fact an outspoken critic who from editorial posts in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York commented incisively—in fiction and non-fiction—on nationalism, democracy, progress, science, exploration, money, materialism, popular taste, and other concerns. As he opposed the pressure to write “American” tales, he asserted the imperative to appeal to a global audience and produced a body of critical and imaginative writing that has been central to the development of cultural expression of the past 200 years. Ironically, then, despite the scorn with which he has sometimes been viewed at home--perhaps for his oppositional audacity--Poe has enjoyed greater international esteem than any of his American contemporaries.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Auditorium (1st Floor)
Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture
All sessions are free and open to the public.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Organizational Structure
The two-day symposium consists of an opening and closing roundtable and four panel discussions on the following topics:

1. Controversies. What were the compelling issues that complicated American nation-building from 1820 until 1861? Presentations might engage specific ideological issues—slavery, immigration, popular democracy, territorial expansion, Manifest Destiny—or consider the cultural, literary effects of the controversies they aroused. How was antebellum literary culture inflected by Democratic-Whig/Republican partisanship? To what extent was literary nationalism implicated in the concealment of controversy or the justification of injustice?
   
2. Cultural Forms. Interventions might focus on any of the media of mass cultural influence— magazines, newspapers, and reviews; lectures, exhibitions, and spectacles; books, editions, or anthologies; images, icons, paintings, sculpture; architecture, monuments, museums, parks, landscape designs, etc. How were these forms politicized or co-opted to enshrine certain visions/versions of American culture? Where did antebellum culture wars mostly take place? What role do libraries and archives (conventional and digital) play in studying such problems?
3. Centers. Presentations might help to distinguish key differences among the literary circles and regional cultures of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and perhaps Baltimore, Charleston, Cincinnati, or New Orleans. How did centers define literary wars and rivalries? How did the view of national literature vary from city to city? What was distinctive about each city’s culture? How did the absence of a true cultural capital (until around 1850) affect literary production? What other “centers” of literary influence merit attention?
4. Cultural Remapping. How might the space of antebellum American culture be more accurately represented? Papers might address both practical and theoretical problems in re-conceiving a decentered culture undergoing rapid growth and change. Amid sectional conflict, what other regions, zones, corridors, boundaries, axes, or routes of cultural influence ought to be identified and examined? How might the multiple ethnic cultures of antebellum America be mapped? Which transnational connections seem cartographically significant?
   
   

Corresponding Events
The Poe Bicentennial Symposium is at the center of programming for a major exhibition devoted to Edgar Allan Poe at the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture. In collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the U.Va. Library presents an exhibition entitled, “From out that shadow”: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe (Through August 1, 2009), displayed in the Main Gallery of the Harrison Institute. The exhibition will then travel to the Harry Ransom Center (September 8 – December 31, 2009). The exhibition explores aspects of Poe’s life and his literary oeuvre, including its reception and influence in France and beyond.

The exhibition and programs are being advertised as part of “Poe Revealed 1809 – 2009,” a cooperative effort among many Virginia historic sites, museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations to commemorate the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe during his bicentennial year. For more information, see: http://www.poe200th.com/poe-in-2009.php

Sponsorship
The Symposium is generously sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Page-Barbour Lecture Endowment, the English Department, American Studies Program, and Harrison Institute.

Questions? Please contact:  Kelly Miller, kellymiller@virginia.edu