Poe’s Ligeia and Helen of Troy

Abstract

William Crisman, Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona campus, was author of the 1996 book The Crises of Language and Dead Signs in Ludwig Tieckk Aose Fiction and over thirty articles on Germanand English-language romanticism. Having read Crisman’s essay “Poe’s Ligeia and Helen of Troy” in manuscript, the editors of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism invited it for consideration after his untimely death. The article was accepted posthumously but could not benefit from his revisions; as a result, the journal has made only necessary styling and copyediting changes with the consent of his son. The following overview of the essay’s significance is offered by Joseph Andriano, Professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and author of Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Mab Gothic Fiction (1993) and Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of theFantasticBeast in Modern Fiction and Film (1999).