Edgar Allan Poe, Pandemic, and Underlying Conditions

It’s not for nothing that Edgar Allan Poe’s works figure prominently in COVID-inspired reconsiderations of the figure of pandemic in literary social history. He lived through one of the worst cholera outbreaks to ever reach the US, lasting from 1832 well into the 1840s, and he has long been remembered as the master of what one might call “pandemic affect” in characters experiencing dread of the unknown, claustrophobia, and mourning.

In this essay, however, I want to argue that to best read Poe in the time of pandemic, we need to appreciate a very different aspect of his perspective—not that of a mimetic artist but of the political economist; not that of the practitioner or inventor of Gothic tropes, but one making a comment—in my reading, one of the darkest imaginable—on the possibility of getting anything but cash for the work of writing on such horrors, and anything but a temporary escape from reading it.