Excerpt from Phreno-Mnemotechny, or the Art of Memory: The Series of Lectures, Explanatory of the Principles of the System, Delivered in New York and Philadelphia, in the Beginning of 1844Yes, happy is he, who, in addition to a cultivated understanding, possesses an extensive power of retention and recollection.* He has always within himself a source of entertainment to which no other treasure is to be compared, at least in the eye of the sage. He can either be usethl in society, or employed in retirement. It the pursuit of knowledge and truth is the favorite theme of his mind and studies, always contented with his fate, he can, more deliberately than any other mortal, free himself in solitude from the and dreams of ambition, the fascinations of vain glory, the turmoils of social troubles, and the cold injustice and disdains of the world.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe’s acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the “undercurrent of meaning” ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe’s art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe’s engagement in the major discourses of the time—religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe’s debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe’s texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection—“The Gold Bug,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales. The essays in the collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. The contributors are Poe scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada: Amy C. Branam, Lauren Curtright, Daniel Fineman, William E. Engel, John C. Havard, Henri Justin, John Edward Martin, Sean Moreland, Philip E. Phillips, Stephanie Sommerfeld, and Timothy N. Towslee.