Edgar Allan Poe and the British magazine tradition: a study of some journalistic conventions and the views of the literary audience on which they were based, 1815 to 1850

Allen, Michael Leckenby (1965). Edgar Allan Poe and the British magazine tradition: a study of some journalistic conventions and the views of the literary audience on which they were based, 1815 to 1850. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Poe was neither widely read nor totally ignored, and he did not see himself solely as either a mass-journalist or an elitist practitioner of "art for art’s sake". A study of his ideas about the audience he wished to reach reveals a vacillation between these two extreme attitudes, a vacillation which reflects his temperamental inconsistency, his divided attitude to Europe, and the conflict between his Southern inheritance and his Northern professional activity. He did, intermittently, look for a compromise which would appeal to "the few" and "the many", and was attracted to the literary journalism of Blackwood’s and other British magazines of the earlier nineteenth century, although his conscious attitude to them was ambivalent. He used, with an intensity all his own, several conventions clearly related to those of the British journals: projecting a literary personality in the same way; engaging in the same kind of critical controversy; striking a similar self-consciously "learned" pose in his fiction, criticism and general writing; and imitating several of the British modes of magazine fiction, in particular the burlesque and the horror tale. Even after the exigencies of his profession had forced him to try and simplify much of his journalism he retained in the rest of his writing, and in his plans for his own magazine, the "Stylus", many of the characteristics of Blackwood’s-type journalism.

Type of Work:	Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)
Award Type:	Doctorates > Ph.D.
College/Faculty:	Faculties (to 1997) > Faculty of Arts
School or Department:	Department of English
Funders:	None/not applicable
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History P Language and Literature > PR English literature
URI:	http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/17968

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