Publications

This book builds upon recent theoretical approaches that define queerness as more of a temporal orientation than a sexual one to explore how Edgar Allan Poe's literary works were frequently invested in imagining lives that contemporary readers can understand as queer, as they stray outside of or aggressively reject normative life paths, including heterosexual romance, marriage, and reproduction, and emphasize individuals' present desires over future plans. The book's analysis of many of Poe's best-known works, including "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," shows that his attraction to the liberation of queerness is accompanied by demonstrations of extreme anxiety about the potentially terrifying consequences of non-normative choices. While Poe never resolved the conflicts in his thinking, this book argues that this compelling imaginative tension between queerness and temporal normativity is crucial to understanding his canon.

This article examines dozens of textual artifacts from 1985 to 2018 that illustrate the significant cultural place that Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” occupied as a touchstone during the early years and subsequent decades of the AIDS crisis as its plot, characters, and imagery became useful vehicles for thinking through numerous issues around the epidemic and for supporting various positions in the social and political debates that developed. A consideration of how these works use “Masque” to reinforce or confront their times' prejudices, to advocate for political resistance and activism, and to address individual and collective grief provides the opportunity to understand how Poe's writing serves its future audiences in ways that its author and its earlier readers could never have imagined.

This essay argues that queer approaches to Poe’s work can benefit from a consideration of his poem “The Raven,” a work invested in finding connections between a subject’s desire and object-choice and his experience of time. The poem is especially relevant to what has been called the “temporal turn” in queer theory over the last decade: it demonstrates how non-normative desire excludes individuals from what Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurism,” the heteronormative prescription that requires individuals to produce future generations through heterosexual pairing, and that casts individuals who do not participate in this behavior as “queer.” In the poem’s famous repetition of “nevermore,” first by the raven and then by the narrator, we can see a growing acknowledgment of the subject’s exclusion from “reproductive futurism.” And, in its conclusion, “The Raven” gestures toward the potential liberation that this exclusion offers as a temporal orientation to queer individuals—the freedom to invent new and more creative life paths as they deviate from heteronormative norms.

This essay explores newly discovered evidence that novelist E.D.E.N Southworth, whose career began as a contributor to the anti-slavery National Era, was a slave-owner during the years she was publishing abolitionist fiction in the Era. The awareness of this status both complicates and clarifies our understanding of Southworth's early fiction, which has been labeled both abolitionist and pro-slavery apologism. The essay explores Southworth's vacillating thinking on slave-owning and recovers her predilection for an affectionate view of the master-slave relationship even as her fiction demonstrates the danger of this view. The concluding section of the essay explores evidence, emerging from an 1854 public dispute between Southworth over the ownership of a slave, that Southworth learned the lesson of her own fiction as she set aside sentimental views of slave-owning and manumitted her slaves.