Edgar Allan Poe and the Great Dismal Swamp: Reading Race and Environment after the Aesthetic Turn

This essay argues for an ecological aesthetic, as interwoven with a larger environment that also includes meter, form, bioregion, history, and embodied experience, to offer a more robust account of nineteenth-century genius than the liberal Enlightenment tradition, with which genius has been almost exclusively associated. Rather than examine the legal subjectivities Poe explores in his detective or criminal fiction, it focuses on fugitive subjectivities in one of his most famous (yet surprisingly little studied) poems, “Dream-Land” (1844), which figures genius as a maroon in the liminal space of Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp.