Few canonized writers—essentially none if we consider only nineteenth-century American authors—make as many appearances in contemporary popular culture as Edgar Allan Poe. Film, pop music, graphic narrative, and genre fiction all bear his indelible mark, with artists in virtually all media revisiting his signature themes and tropes, retelling his stories, or featuring the author himself in fictionalized cameos. It's only fitting, then, that the kindred fields of reception, translation, and adaptation studies have proven so productive for Poe scholarship. As part of this recent critical focus on Poe's reception, Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture (2012), edited by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm, adds to our understanding of Poe's far-reaching impact, while demonstrating the value of approaching his work from the intertextual perspective of adaptation studies.
One of the collection's more ambitious goals, as explained in Perry and Sederholm's introductory essay, is to situate Poe as a “matrix-figure,”...
