Rigal Aragón, Margarita & González Moreno, Beatriz. Poe in Spain, Fall Issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. (The Pennsylvania State University: Penn State Lehigh Valley), 2009.
Funded by the “Poe Studies Association” and printed at Saint Joseph´s University (Pennsylvania, USA), The Edgar Allan Poe Review contains in its Fall 2009 issue a series of interesting and enlightening essays written on the occasion of the bicentennial which commemorates the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. Margarita Rigal and Beatriz González act in this issue as guest editors for the “Spanish” essays. These essays are organized in two parts. The first, entitled “Poe in Spain on the Occasion of His Bicenntenial”, includes two articles dealing with the relation of Poe with two Victorian writers: Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. More specifically, Fernando Galván deals with the influence Dickens´ works exerted on Poe´s theory of the short story, the unity of effect and on some works such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, “Ligeia”, or “The Raven”, among others. Next, Beatriz González studies in “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Hauntings of the “American Blood-Curdler”” the impact which Poe had on Conan Doyle´s Gothic tales, underlining the fact that Dupin was not Doyle´s only soured of inspiration nor was Holmes his only creation.
The second part, “Poe´s Legacies in Spain”, comprises six articles focusing on Poe´s reception in Spain from 1850´s to the present. This part opens with the study by Margarita Rigal in which she demonstrates how Poe has been misread both by Spanish readers and researchers over the last 150 years. Santiago Rodríguez deals with the response which Poe´s poetry aroused in Spain during the nineteenth century. In the following essay, Ricardo Marín concentrates on the connections between Poe and the Spanish Romantic writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) as regards the treatment of visual sensations. Next, José R. Ibáñez analyzes the relations between “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” and a Spanish tale entitled “Siete historias en una”, composed by the scarcely known author José Fernández Bremón (1839-1910). In the fifth of the articles within this second part, Emilio Cañadas investigates the influence of Poe on a contemporary Spanish writer, José Jiménez Lozano (1930-). Finally, Isabel Jiménez and Ángel Galdón, present us with a study about the most recent impact of Poe´s works on Spanish popular culture.