Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe

While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, Engel is the first to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their compositional practice. Rather than simply offering an account of what these authors read, Engel focuses principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus in order to illustrate the authors' profound debt to the past.