Edgar Allan Poe notoriously identified "the death . . . of a beautiful woman" as "the most poetical topic in the world." Despite that cringeworthy claim, Poe drew creative inspiration from female authors, and women figure prominently among the artists and critics fascinated by the writer's creative legacy. A book-length work about the various ways in which women-Poe's female contemporaries, scholars, writers and artists, as well as women characters in Poe adaptations-have influenced perceptions of Poe is long overdue. Covering a time frame that extends from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first, this collection features essays about all of these subjects. One goal of this book is recognizing how women have helped establish Poe's reputation in the U.S. and abroad. The other is drawing attention to ways that constructions of womanhood accepted by Poe are revised in popular culture, a sphere where artists-in film, fiction, and comics-build on the subversive potential of Poe's work while exposing its ideological limitations. Poe and Women will appeal not only to Poe specialists but also to anyone interested in his ongoing relevance to gender discussions inside and outside the academy.

This collection explores how anthologizers and editors of Edgar Allan Poe play an integral role in shaping our conceptions of Poe as the author we have come to recognize, revere, and critique today. In the spheres of literature and popular culture, Poe wields more global influence than any other U.S. author. This influence, however, cannot be attributed solely to the quality of Poe's texts or to his compellingly tragic biography. Rather, his continued prominence as a writer owes much to the ways that Poe has been interpreted, portrayed, and packaged by an extensive group of mediators ranging from anthologizers, editors, translators, and fellow writers to literary critics, filmmakers, musicians, and illustrators. In this volume, the work of presenting Poe's texts for public consumption becomes a fascinating object of study in its own right, one that highlights the powerful and often overlooked influence of those who have edited, anthologized, translated, and adapted the author's writing over the past 170 years.

Edgar Allan Poe wields more influence in the spheres of literature and popular culture on a world scale than any other US author. This influence, however, does not rely on the quality of Poe's texts alone nor on the compellingly tragic nature of his biography; his reputation and his ubiquitous presence owe much of their longevity to the ways Poe has been interpreted and portrayed by his advocates-other writers, translators, literary critics, literary historians, illustrators, film makers, musicians-and packaged by various mediators in the literary field, especially editors and anthologizers. As this study demonstrates, the division between Poe's advocates and the mediators who organize his work for consumption by the reading public can be very porous since many of Poe's most adamant proponents-Charles Baudelaire and Julio Cortazar, for example-also anthologized, edited, and/or translated his works. Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)national Canons focuses on the works produced by Poe's anthologizers and editors, both the famous and the lesser-known, whose labor often takes place behind the scenes. Poe's editors and anthologizers exercise real power, and over the last 170 years, they have crafted and framed the various Poes we recognize, revere, cherish, and critique today.