Poe, Journalist and Critic, (1969), title page and table of contents


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Title page:

 

 

POE

Journalist & Critic

Robert D. Jacobs

 

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • BATON ROUGE

 

[[1969]]

 

 



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Table of Contents

Contents

                                       Page
Preface    vii
I • The Matrix    3
II • “Letter to Mr. —— ——”    35
III • The Apprenticeship of a Critic    61
IV • The Zoilus of the Messenger    94
V • Conflicting Aims: Journalist or Critic?    118
VI • The Final Cause of Art    135
VII • Towards Standards    159
VIII • Standards Achieved: The Poet's Art    192
IX • Interlude with Billy Burton: The Artistic Conscience    209
X • Graham's: Honest and Fearless Opinion    249
XI • The Province of the Critic    274
XII • The Province of Poetry    296
XIII • Art as Stimulus: The Single Effect    315
XIV • Politics and Poetry: The Problem of Meaning    329
XV • The Universal Audience    350
XVI • The Progress of Art    376
XVII • The Plot of God    402
XVIII • The Plots of Man    427
Index    455

 


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The dedication reads: For Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

The following text appears on inside flaps of the dust jacket:

[inside front flap:]

POE

Journalist and Critic

ROBERT D. JACOBS

The journalistic world of the mid-nineteenth century was often a grubby world of deadline pressures and unsympathetic employers. In this environment Edgar Poe became a veteran literary critic. Many scholars consider Poe's critical work the most significant aspect of his career. This important book will be recognized for years to come as the definitive study of Poe as a journalist and critic.

Poe was unique among nineteenth-century American critics because he not only evaluated literary works but also developed an aesthetic theory and a theory of nature to support it. Poe, as a literary critic, applied his own literary theories to the work of others.

In Poe: Journalist and Critic, Professor Robert D. Jacobs examines the operative regulations of Poe's practical criticism instead of concentrating exclusively on his aesthetic principles — a viewpoint that has been conspicuously neglected in other studies of Poe as a critic. Professor Jacobs investigates Poe's criticism chronologically to show Poe's process of maturation and his development as a critic—from his first reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835 to final reviews in 1849.

The author says Poe was a polemicist who sought to enforce his doctrine through the mass media, the journals, and lecture platforms of his time. He analyzes Poe's criticism and critical theory and shows how it relates to his fiction, poetry, and the events in his life.

Professor Jacobs shows how eighteenth-century ideas, the new romanticism, and Poe's Southern origins influenced his critical ideas and political views, and gives the reader a [inside back flap:] broad philosophical rule with which to measure Poe's deviation under the pressures of the journalistic world of his time. He demonstrates that Poe, as a working critic, looked backward toward the mechanistic psychological aesthetic of the previous century and forward toward the dynamic organicism of the romantic period.

This book makes clear previously puzzling problems of Poe's apparent and real contradictions in critical theory, and introduces almost universally ignored aspects of journalism as it affected the writing of reviews and criticism of the day.

Poe: Journalist and Critic is a major scholarly contribution to the study of a significant American author.

A volume in the Southern Literary Studies series, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

ROBERT D. JACOBS is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is co-editor (with Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) of Southern Renascence and South: Modern Southern Literature in Its Cultural Setting. He has published articles in various literary journals. A native of Mississippi, he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Mississippi and his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University.

 


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Notes:

Robert Durene Jacobs was born October 1, 1918, in Bovina, Mississippi. He died on October 28, 1998, in Atlanta, GA. He married Mildred Page Simmons (1920-2013), and they had a daughter, Bonnie Page Jacobs. He obtained his B. A. (1937) and M. A. (1938) from University of Mississippi. He obtained his Ph. D. From Johns Hopkins, in 1953. He was a Colonel in the US Marine Corp, with active service during WWII, and subsequent periods os service in the Korean War and Vietnam. He was an assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins, 1948-1953, while he worked on his Ph. D. By 1959 he was teaching at the University of Kentucky. He later became the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Language and Literature at Georgia State University (1976-1982).

The text for this electronic version of this book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included. Although considerable effort has been made to be true to the original printed edition, some modifications have been made in formatting for this electronic presentation. Special effort has been attempted to imitate the spacing and formatting of chapter headings and the use of drop caps.

All material in this edition is protected by copyright, exclusively held by the publisher. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from the Louisiana State University Press to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect the authors’ copyright, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-80042
SBN 8071-08464
Printed in the United States of America by The Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghampton, New York
Designed by Jules B. McKee

 

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[S:0 - PJC, 1969] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe, Journalist and Critic - (1969)