Reading and Re-Reading: Jorge Luis Borges' Literary Criticism on Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

The relationship between Jorge Luis Borges' and Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction has attracted the attention of several literary critics over the past twenty-five years (Irwin, Bennett, and various others). This conversation, however, pays little attention to Poe's significant presence in Borges' literary criticism from the 1920s through 1986. This essay examines Borges' literary relationship with Poe as seen in Borges' literary criticism—articles, lectures, book-reviews, prologues, and interviews—and in various archival manuscripts and notations that Borges left behind. These materials demonstrate that Borges perennially re-read Poe and that his references to Poe's work shifted Poe's reputation in the Río de la Plata region and throughout Spanish America from poet to fiction writer.

Keywords:

• BORGES
• POE
• BORGES' LITERARY CRITICISM
• REPUTATION
• RE-READING
• DETECTIVE FICTION
• PYM
• INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emron Esplin

Emron Esplin earned his PhD in English with an emphasis on the literatures of the Americas and a graduate minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University in 2008. He currently teaches inter-American literary studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. He also works as a faculty member for the international summer school program on the Americas run by the Center for the Study of the Americas at the University of Graz, Austria. In his scholarship and in his teaching, Emron seeks to redefine America in Hemispheric terms. His current research includes a book-length project on Poe and La Plata and various pieces dealing with the concept of ‘Greater Mexico’.