This panel follows the occasional tradition of examining Poe’s life and works in an Eastern Seaboard city where he once lived and wrote that happens to be hosting the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, but with a West Coast slant as the MLA gathers in a land that Poe called “Eldorado.” Synonymous with the California Gold Rush, 1849 was also the year of Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death. 1849 was a productive year for Poe. He published five stories—“Mellonta Tauta, “Hop-Frog,” “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “X-ing a Paragrab,” and “Landor's Cottage”—and six poems: “A Dream within a Dream,” “Eldorado,” “For Annie,” “To My Mother,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells” (the latter two were published posthumously but remain two of Poe’s most popular poems in the twenty-first century). This session hopes to pay serious attention to these last works by Poe and to his final year of life. It also hopes to take place in a physical room (for the first time since the MLA convention in Seattle in 2020) in the beautiful city of San Francisco!

Send 250-word abstracts and 1-page CVs to emronesplin@gmail.com with the subject line “Poe and 1849” by March 15, 2022.