Marketplace, literary

As I have been arguing throughout this chapter, Poe trades on the discourse of slavery to manufacture the terror of his tales and to make them sell even as he reveals the conventions he appropriates to be market productions. He is complicit with the literary marketplace even as he critiques it. One of his final tales, Hop-Frog (1849), makes his simultaneous mastery of and enslavement to the literary marketplace clear. On one hand, Hop-Frog presents a stinging critique of how the literary marketplace turns the author into a slave to the audience s voracious appetite for sensationalized horror. 

On the other, it shows the author s mastery of convention. In figuring the literary marketplace as the site of slavery, the tale elides the very different subject positions of author and slave. Poe s appropriation of the figure of the slave as a means to explore his fiction s commodification in the literary marketplace is no less problematic than his use of slavery s sensationalism to sell his tales. In neither case does Poe s critique of the literary marketplace outweigh his adherence to its conventions. 

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