Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary...

Melville's passion for things astronomical is visible throughout his canon. Zimmerman places Melville's many astronomical citations within the thematic context of the works in which they appear and within the larger cultural and historical context of nineteenth-century studies. In addition he provides a comprehensive catalogue of every reference to astronomy, its practitioners, and related topics in Melville's works. Herman Melville: Stargazer will be of great interest to scholars and students of American literature as well as those interested in the relationship between science and...