REVIEW

Lesley Ginsberg
"The Specter of Race in Poe Studies"

This group of nine articles takes its title from the second chapter of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992), in which Morrison claims that "[n]o early Amrican writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe." In this timely volume, editors J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg have assembled a group of essays—the majority printed here for the first time—that collectively articulate the new direction Poe studies has taken during the 1990s regarding the relationship between Poe and race. Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race has myriad applications (including in the undergraduate classroom) and deserves the attention of scholars, students, and fans of Poe.