This paper discusses early nineteenth-century authorship through an analysis of transgressive, double and fragmented monsters in Gothic novels and tales. Relying on the concept of ‘figures of the author’, I read monsters such as the vampire, the doppelganger and the cyborg as Gothic refigurations of Romantic authorship. In analysing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘The Man that Was Used Up’ (1839), I examine how the characteristic othering of bodies, such as occurs in the Gothic monster, comes to be representative of the dangers that Gothic writing, in its monstrous and mechanical popularity, posed to the dominant idea of the Romantic author and its features such as individuality, originality and organic totality.

The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe is the first study to address the rhetorical dimensions of Poe’s textual and discursive practices. It argues that Poe is a figure and figurer of the emergence of the modern understanding of literature in the early nineteenth century that resulted from the birth of the romantic author and the so-called ‘death of rhetoric’. Building on accounts of Poe as a skilled navigator of American antebellum print culture, Gero Guttzeit reinterprets Poe as representative of the vital role that transatlantic rhetoric played in antebellum literature. He investigates rhetorical figures of the author in Poe’s critical writings, tales, poems, and lectures to give a new account of Poe’s significance for antebellum literary culture. In so doing, he also proposes a general rhetorical theory of theoretical, poetical, and performative figures of the author. Beyond Poe studies, the book intervenes in current debates on the romantic origins of the modern author and demonstrates that rhetorical theory offers new ways of exploring authorship beyond the nineteenth century.