Reading Cities: Devotional Seeing in the Nineteenth Century

Genres of Conspiracy in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

“…Luc Boltanski notices the contemporaneity, in the late nineteenth century, of detective fiction with the first instances of 'paranoia' as a psychiatric condition defined by Emil Kraepelin in 1899 and observes that '[t]he investigator in a detective story thus acts like a person with paranoia, the difference being that he is healthy ' (2014: 15). Much earlier and without this diagnostic terminology, Edgar Allan Poe wove into his 'little stalking narrative' (Rachman 1997: 656) a type of illness whose symptoms are nervousness and hyper-observation. The narrator of Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd' (1840) describes himself as recovering from illness, 'in one of those happy moods …, when the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its everyday condition ' (2008: 84).…”

Who is Poe's “Man of the Crowd”?

“…S T E V E N F I N K "Robert Byer's equally wonderful Benjaminian reading of the tale") concludes that "in the end 'The Man of the Crowd' leaves the reader with the figure of the old man (who effectively stands for the city itself) as an illegible book." 5 Whether because of the old man's seemingly innate incomprehensibility or the narrator's perceptual inadequacy, critics have not merely been incurious about pressing further to identify the Man of the Crowd, but have clung to the notion of his fundamental inscrutability. Richard Kopley would seem to be something of an exception in his recent source study suggesting that Poe's portrait of the Man of the Crowd draws heavily on the character of "Mr. Gordon" in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Pelham (1828); but even as he makes his case, Kopley concludes that "Poe brilliantly intensified the mystery of Bulwer's character, forbearing narrative explanations, intimating only the strange, the enigmatic, the diabolical."…”