Poe’s Balloonin’

Edgar Allan Poe: a trickster or a sophisticated man of letters? Written in the turmoil of the 1830s and 1840s, two tales of Poe are here subjected to in-depth inquiry: “Hans Phaall,” a bizarre, lesser-known tale published in 1835, and the well-known “The Balloon Hoax,” published as an “article” in the first American penny newspaper, the New York Sun, in 1844. Drawing on their manifold references to the American culture of the time, from ballooning to the telegraph, to the notion of “useful knowledge,” this volume shows the significance the two texts have in Poe’s personal trajectory as a literary author. Martinez focuses on the way “Hans Phaall” and “The Balloon Hoax” bring together the rhetoric of the hoax, journalism, and fiction without either wholly submitting to, or wholly opposing the market and the popular, and locates in his peculiar manipulation of the hoax Poe’s contradictory but unique claim for the autonomy of his authorship.