Hopkins Press Podcast 3.8: Poe Studies on The Poe/tics of Reception

Last January, at the MLA conference in New Orleans, the journal Poe Studies hosted a panel discussion about the influence of Eliza Richards’ book Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle. This is a book that has played an important role on the study of 19th century women poets as well as other minoritized poets, print culture, and even Poe himself.

Richards’ book celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and the forthcoming issue of Poe Studies  — due out in Fall 2025 — will be a special issue featuring new essays celebrating its impact and expanding on questions and exploring new inquiries the book inspires. Today we talk with Kelly Ross, the editor of Poe Studies; Elissa Zellinger, the guest editor of the forthcoming special issue, and Eliza Richards herself. 

While we wait for the next issue to drop, we've developed a Poe reading list from past issues of Poe Studies and other journals from the Hopkins Press roster.

Eliza Richards is a Professor of English, the Director of Graduate Studies and Director of Graduate Admissions at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books include Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Emily Dickinson in Context (edited collection; Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the US Civil War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Her new book, The Collected Works of George Moses Horton: A Critical Edition is forthcoming from UNC Press.

Elissa Zellinger is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women’s Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC 2020). She is the guest editor of the Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation special issue on “The Poe/tics of Reception” (forthcoming 2025) and her articles have appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

Kelly Ross specializes in Early and 19th-century American literature and African American literature, with secondary interests in 20th-century American literature, detective fiction, poetry, and American Studies. Her first book, Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature, was published by Oxford University Press (2023). Her work has appeared in PMLA, the Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Leviathan, the Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, and American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860. She edits Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation.

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Music for this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast is “le train sur du velours” by Jean Toba, licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and available at Free Music Archive.