In Poe's Wake

Explores how Edgar Allan Poe has become a household name, as much a brand as an author. Youll find his face everywhere, from coffee mugs, bobbleheads, and T-shirts to the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Edgar Allan Poe is one of American cultures most recognizable literary figures, his life and works inspiring countless derivations beyond the literary realm. Poes likeness and influence have been found in commercial illustration and kitsch, art installations, films, radio plays, childrens cartoons, and video games. What makes Poe so hugely influential in media other than his own? What do filmmakers, composers, and other artists find in Poe that suits their purposes so often and so variously? In Poes Wake locates the source of the writers enduring legacy in two vernacular aesthetic categories: the graphic and the atmospheric. Jonathan Elmer uses Poe to explore these two terms and track some deep patterns in their use, not through theoretical labor but through close encounters with a wide sampling of aesthetic objects that avail themselves of Poes work. Poes writings are violent and macabre, memorable both for certain grisly images and for certain prevailing moods or atmospheresdread, creepiness, and mournfulness. Furthermore, a bundle of Poe traitshis thematic emphasis on extreme sensation, his flexible sense of form, his experimental and modular method, and his iconic visageamount to what could be called a Poe brand, one as likely to be found in music videos or comics as in novels and stories. Encompassing Ren Magritte, Claude Debussy, Lou Reed, Roger Corman, Spongebob Squarepants, and many others, Elmers book shows how the Poe brand opens trunk lines to aesthetic experiences fundamental to a multi-media world.