A Case of Transatlantic Intertextuality: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

The American scholar Burton R. Pollin established literary connections between Edgar Allan Poe and the Victorian English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, tracing the influence the latter exerted over many of Poe’s tales (1965;1996; 2000). Similarly, Allan Conrad Christensen stated that Bulwer-Lytton was one of the writers that had exerted a most powerful influence on Poe’s early prose (2004). Moreover, as a literary critic, Poe also reviewed many of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels and declared himself an admirer of the English writer (1835; 1836; 1840; 1841a; 1841b; 1842). In 1830, when Poe was expelled from West Point Academy, Bulwer-Lytton was already a highly acclaimed writer about to publish Paul Clifford; the novel that inaugurated his cycle of Newgate fiction which incorporated the novelty of featuring a criminal as the hero of the story. This characteristic would be widely displayed in many of Edgar Allan Poe’s subsequent short-stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Taking these precedents into consideration, this article aims at gaining insight into the intertextuality established between Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe, identifying thematic links and disparities through a comparative analysis of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, as well as examining the idiosyncratic characteristics which differentiate the novel and the short-story in nineteenth-century England and America