The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2018)

Kopley shows Poe’s use of the symmetrically-framed center in such works as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Man of the Crowd,” and “The Gold-Bug,” and goes on to demonstrate the hidden pattern in a variety of works by other authors, including Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train.  Kopley demonstrates that reading for the midpoint constitutes a powerful tool in literary interpretation.

Reviews

"[O]riginating mostly in the classroom, many of Kopley's chapters would furnish excellent texts to teach in combination with their primary materials, as they alert students to the formal aspects of literary writing. The historic and thematic breadth of the texts under discussion also adds to the persuasiveness of Kopley's argument for the relevance of the center, opening up intriguing possibilities for further chapters in the cultural history of the literary center. [...] [I]n drawing attention to a still strangely underdiscussed aspect of form, Kopley's ideas deserve to be in our center of attention." —American Studies Quarterly

“Richard Kopley’s The Formal Center in Literature presents a stimulating example of (very) close reading.”—Antoine Dechêne, Modern Language Review

"The Formal Center in Literature is a lively read that returns a consideration of form to the center of the reader's attention." —Jonathan W. Murphy, Edgar Allan Poe Review