cfp.english.upenn.edu

In celebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial year, the academic journal Meridian critic (The Annals of Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Literature Series) prepares a special section for its second 2009 issue: Poe’s Modernity and Postmodernity. We invite submission of papers exploring any aspect that may throw new light on Poe’s stature and legitimacy as a cultural myth, on the indebtedness of Western literature, art, and culture to his genius, or on his reception in the various European and transatlantic literary and critical traditions.

Some of the topics that might be taken into consideration are:

• Poe and the dawns of the modernist sensibility;
• Poe and the European avant-garde;
• The inventor of genres and the manipulator of conventions;
• The cryptographic imagination;
• Horror and humour;
• The fascination of the borderline – the rational and irrational in Poe’s art;
• The beautiful and the sublime – Poe’s aesthetic and textual philosophy;
• Poe’s literary and critical histrionics – (self-) parody, irony, satire, banter, hoax; dissimulation, mystification, the mask and the double as motifs and textual/narrative strategies;
• Deconstructive and deconstructed Poe – his centrality in poststructuralist debates on textuality and meaning;
• Psychoanalytic Poe – the unconscious in/of the text;
• (De)constructions of masculinity and femininity in Poe’s work;
• Poe between the canon and popular culture;
• Poe’s afterlife in postmodern popular culture.

Deadline for submission: 15 September 2009
Maximum length: 30,000 characters
Please send your contributions to corneliamacsiniuc@yahoo.com

Dr. Cornelia Macsiniuc
University of Suceava, Department of English
Str. Universitatii nr. 13
720229 Suceava, Romania
Phone: +40 740 142 883