Poe’s adherence to a strict aesthetic formalism used to be problematic for studies of the relationship between his work and its American context; the methodology of New Historicism has helped to surmount this problem but sometimes with excessive emphasis on socio-historical contexts. This essay examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe’s canonical piece “The Man of the Crowd” in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the “hegemony” of new historicism in particular. It then suggests an alternative method of reading literary texts and their contexts — one based on Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts. It offers an analysis of “The Man of the Crowd” as an illustration of this method.

June 2017: Iulian Cananau is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Gävle. Before moving to Sweden in 2011, he was an assistant professor at the English Department of the University of Bucharest, where he coordinated the American Studies undergraduate program. He is a Fulbright alumnus (2007/2008 research grant at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge). His latest publication is Constituting Americanness: A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015). His research interests lie with literary history writing, literary theory, and conceptual history, as well as, more recently, education theory and the methodology of teaching literature.