SOURCE: “How to Place Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym in Science-Dominated Intellectual History, and How to Extract It Again,” in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 31-47.

In the following excerpt, Limon explores some ways in which Poe's scientific ideas described in his Eureka comment on problems in Pym, but points out that Pym remains firmly rooted in the realm of fiction.

I.

After a dry spell in the practice of intellectual history, Foucault seems to have brought it back into vogue, though Foucault makes his own intellectual project so different from (say) A. O. Lovejoy's that he may be right to refuse to call it intellectual history at all.¹ Lovejoy, of course, defined the intellectual historian's essential task as the tracking of durable unit-ideas “in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods.”² Historians after Foucault, however, insist that the same idea in a different intellectual...