Abstract
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 359-387 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Modern Philology |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 21 Oct 2016 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2016 |
Research Groups and Themes
- Centre for Black Humanities
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Dive into the research topics of 'Edgar Allan Poe and the Great Dismal Swamp: Reading Race and Environment after the Aesthetic Turn'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Profiles
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Dr Erin Forbes
- Department of English - Senior Lecturer in African American Literature
Person: Academic