The communication revolution of the 1830s—combining the steam press, the telegraph, the daguerreotype, and the computing calculator—expanded both the media audience and its subject matter, promoting Poe’s career by opening new subjects for magazine fiction and also new kinds of literary criticism.
One of the few writers of his generation to feel at home with the new technologies, Poe credited his interest in them with the creation of some of his own favorite works. “Ligea,” he began—quickly inserting an immediate surprise—was “undoubtedly the best story I have written—besides Scheherazade” (PL 616). Of course, few contemporary editors, critics, and readers understood the many discoveries and inventions Poe catalogued in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (Godey’s, February 1845). Poe exploited the gap by making it an occasion for literary satire. His way of describing several dozen remarkable subjects in contemporary science and technology was to fling extreme hyperbole,...
