Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on French literature is well known, but his impact on Latin America was no less significant. In Borge’s Poe, Emron Esplin examines the latter through the stories and essays of a looming figure in Latin American literature, Jorge Luis Borges. As a young writer in the 1920s, Borges challenged Poe’s image in the Spanish-speaking world as a maudlin Romantic poet, emphasizing instead his stories and giving a nuanced analysis of the role of reason and intellect in Poe’s fantastic tales. Borge’s Poe is a remarkable exercise in micro-scholarship, with the author going so far as to analyze the handwriting size of Borge’s marginal notes for clues.
