| This dissertation is a reading of a much neglected but wildly compelling work of Edgar Allan Poe's in which he analyzes the handwriting of over one hundred of his contemporaries---from fellow poets, prose writers and magazinists to Supreme Court Justices and one former President---while also furnishing exemplary specimens of the handwriting in the shape of a collection of facsimile signatures or autographs. Given that this dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Poe's Autography, its first principal aim is to build a context in which this highly eccentric work can be appreciated: to illustrate its relation to the unique literary climate of antebellum America, in which it took shape, and to explore its resonance with the rest of Poe's idiosyncratic corpus. While the extraordinary richness and complexity of Autography makes the way to meet this aim relatively clear, it also introduces an element of mystery into this first concerted effort to give Autography its due. If, as this dissertation argues, Autography is profoundly resonant with the rest of Poe's corpus and the historical moment in which it was published, then why would it have gone for so long unnoticed and unread? To the end, not of definitively answering this question, but of addressing it, the second principal aim of this dissertation will be to make the long tradition of Autography's being of little to no interest to American literary history a meaningful aspect of the interpretations of it given here, while their first impulse is to break with this tradition. The idea is that this particular forgotten thing should be remembered first as a forgotten thing if and when it is going to have a future. |
