Review by Booklist Review
Edgar Allan Poe was a multifaceted and complicated man, an original thinker and an inveterate drinker, an ambitious businessman who was nearly always destitute, and a prodigious talent who engaged in petty squabbles with other writers. He made friends and enemies with equal ease. Tresch's luminous study situates Poe's life and work in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century scientific revolution. Poe was fascinated and influenced by discoveries in physics, medicine, and astronomy as well as more fringe fields such as phrenology, mesmerism, and animal magnetism, and he made lasting contributions in many areas. He may well be the first to propose the theory of the big bang in his overlooked Eureka (1848), and his best-selling work during his lifetime was a science book. Tresch brilliantly illuminates the process by which Poe synthesized his scientific knowledge in his works of the imagination. Poe greatly influenced the genres of mystery, science fiction, horror, and adventure, not to mention criticism, poetry, and science journalism. As Tresch so trenchantly establishes, Poe was a towering genius who somehow dwelled in the shadows of his own creations.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Tresch (The Romantic Machine) sheds light on Edgar Allan Poe's engagement with science in this intriguing biography. In 1838, Tresch writes, Poe arrived in Philadelphia, "the nation's most active center for scientific research," and his immersion in the conversations among journalists, scientists, and artists who were discussing prominent scientific concerns, such as the tension "between hardheaded empiricism and controversial speculation" informed many of his best-known works. Tresch carefully reads Poe's poems, stories, and essays, illustrating the ways that Poe balanced the literary with the scientific. "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example, combined elements from gothic and fantastic tales with imagery from alchemy, and featured "the ethers, atmospheres, and energies of experimental science." "The Purloined Letter," meanwhile, sees Poe critiquing empirical and mathematical sciences: they were narrow, he argued, because they left no room for awe. While Tresch addresses the common impression of Poe as a "morbid dreamer" and a penniless writer, he takes things further by offering a nimble account of the emerging science of Poe's day. Fans of Poe's work--and science enthusiasts--will appreciate Tresch's fresh angle. (June)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Tresch (history of art, science, and folk practice, Warburg Inst.; Romantic Machine) situates Poe's work within the 19th century's science in flux. Poe hadn't the time nor the money to pursue extensive scientific study, but he did receive practical scientific training at West Point and kept up with the latest developments via general magazines, several of which he wrote for. In these magazines, phrenology and mesmerism flourished alongside astronomy and electricity, and Tresch proves that Poe wasn't above penning provocative hoax science articles, whether as ironic critique or to earn money. Tresch focuses on Poe's texts about exploration, medical curiosity, and the relationship between science (reason) and nature (imagination). These culminated in Poe's little-read cosmological work Eureka, which applied his theory of fiction (every work should have a singular effect) to the universe. Poe has been painted as an extraordinarily prescient man who foresaw much of quantum theory and cosmogony, but Tresch makes the more modest claim that Poe posited a unification of humankind, imagination, and the physical universe. VERDICT Fans of the literary Poe will be intrigued by this lesser-known side of the author, and scientists will appreciate an accessible biography.--Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific fiction writer, poet, and literary critic viewed through a scientific lens. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is synonymous with the grotesque. Tresch, professor of the history of art, science, and folk practice at the Warburg Institute, wants us to think of Poe as a scientist, as well. Tresch's expansive biography takes the chronological road, with Poe "at the center of the maelstrom of American science in the first half of the nineteenth century." Enamored by science as a young man, Poe wrote "Sonnet--To Science" in 1830. Arguing against other critics, who claim that the poem criticizes science, Tresch argues that Poe writes in praise of science. In fact, the sonnet "laid out a program for Poe's life's work." At West Point, he studied mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, all of which "decisively shaped his career as a poet, critic, and author." In Baltimore in 1833, Poe won a fiction contest for "MS. Found in a Bottle," in which he balanced scientific language with catastrophic revelation. Near starvation, he was saved by a job at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. His stories and essays on science were warmly received, but he was soon let go. In New York, he wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a novel about the "quest for discovery and its costs." In 1839, he secured a position at The Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia, where scientific innovation was thriving. Testing "new literary formulas," he wrote his most distinctive tales, solidified his "reputation for scientific acumen," championed the art of photography, explored code cracking, and wrote a scientific textbook, The Conchologist's First Book. Surprisingly, it was his only bestseller. Meanwhile, Poe's drinking and his wife's death were affecting his health. He hoped his ambitious new book and lecture tour on cosmology, Eureka, (a "serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess") would help him gain back his popularity. He died a year later. Throughout, Tresch does a fine job balancing insightful discussions of Poe's literary works alongside his intriguing scientific pursuits. A surprising side of Poe splendidly revealed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
