Borges's Poe by Emron Esplin

Borges's Poe by Emron Esplin

Edgar Allan Poe's image and import shifted during the twentieth century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three writers from the R o de la Plata region of South America--Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cort zar. In Borges's Poe, Emron Esplin focuses on the second author in this trio and argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe's works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe's image throughout Spanish America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer.

Most scholarship that couples Poe and Borges focuses primarily on each writer's detective stories, refers only occasionally to their critical writings and the remainder of their fiction, and deemphasizes the cultural context in which Borges interprets Poe. In this book, Esplin explores Borges's and Poe's published works and several previously untapped archival resources to reveal an even more complex literary relationship between the two writers. Emphasizing the spatial and temporal context in which Borges interprets Poe--the R o de la Plata region from the 1920s through the 1980s--Borges's Poe underlines Poe's continual presence in Borges's literary corpus. More important, it demonstrates how Borges's literary criticism, his Poe translations, and his own fiction create a disparate Poe who serves as a precursor to Borges's own detective and fantastic stories and as an inspiration to the so-called Latin American Boom.

Seen through this more expansive context, Borges's Poe shows that literary influence runs both ways since Poe's writings visibly affect Borges the poet, story writer, essayist, and thinker while Borges's analyses and translations of Poe's work and his responses to Poe's texts in his own fiction forever change how readers of Poe return to his literary corpus.

Emron Esplin is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University.

Jon Smith is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University. He is coeditor of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies and is coeditor with Riché Richardson of The New Southern Studies series.

Rich Richardson is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820355375
ISBN 10	0820355372
Title	Borges's Poe
Author	Emron Esplin
Series	The New Southern Studies
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	2019-01-30
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable