Jonathan Hartmann received his PhD from The City University of New York (CUNY) and teaches 19th and 20th-Century literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

• 1. The Problem of Poe’s Appeal: Intellectual and Market Background 2. Poe’s Composite Autobiography 3. The Recycling of Critical Authority: Lessons from Coleridge and Hazlitt 4. The Debunking Work of Poe’s light gothic Tales 5. The Importance of Ambiguity: Unreliable Narration and the Marketing of Sensation. Afterword. Notes. Bibliography.

"Hartmann, an independent New York City writer and literary scholar, was commissioned by the editors of Routledge's Studies in American Popular History and Culture series to write this book on the relative difficulties in conveying the appeal of Edgar Allan Poe to contemporary publishers and readers of the time. Poe challenged his audiences by introducing the concept of an unreliable narrative structure, which led to a wave of criticism that hampered the writer's success. This brief book, aimed at literature scholars and students, documents the eventual changes in critical perception by showing how Poe finally found his audience." -- Book News Inc., August 2008