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James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993, $30). Pp. 365. ISBN 0 300 05 5 30 7.

then, Poe, despite his insistence on the short story, has a key place within the development of the American novel. Thus Kenneth Silverman's introduction offers a useful and comprehensive overview of Poe's position as a writer in relation to recent re-readings of his work. Indeed the volume as a whole is very much framed within a psychoanalytic approach, and yet despite the perspective there is an equal admission (even celebration) of how Poe's stories have the "ability to re-awaken magical beliefs" and enliven "uncanny feelings." Quite so. The essays as a whole expand on the obvious sense of the perverse, and do so very much within the context of Lacan and Derrida that we have come to expect of recent Poe studies. However, each essay offers a useful and distinct viewpoint: not so much concerned to reduce the writing to exegesis as to open it out to possible meanings and the process of explication. The approach is invariably prospective rather than reductive. Thus Christopher Bentley asserts that Poe sought to "puzzle his readers." His essay develops a basic aspect of the whole art (and act) of telling in Poe's writing. Similarly, Louise J. Kaplan offers an essay on "The Fall of the House of Usher" which pursues Poe's use of the hoaxer, the liar, and the imposter as basic to his narrative effect. In a lengthy and detailed analysis "Usher" is discussed in relation to a series of problematic psychological contexts. In a similar way, David Vanleev offers an essay on the significance of Inspector Dupin and develops a view of the "detective" stories much influenced by Lacanian approaches. But perhaps the central essay of the volume is by David S. Reynolds on "The Cask of Amontillado." Once again this is a dense and detailed offering which, whilst placing the story in its cultural setting equally argues for the way in which the story is "a prime example of Poe's ability to sculpt materials from literature and culture into a masterwork of terror." The volume concludes with a useful essay by J. Gerald Kennedy on "Ligeia" and what it terms "The problem of dying women" clearly a subject close to Poe's own experience.