The life of Edgar Allan Poe / Eric W. Carlson -- The sources of Poe's youthful despair / Jeffrey Meyers -- Poe's derangement in the late 1840s / Scott Peeples -- Poe's characters as self-portraits / Claudia C. Morrison -- Madness as realism, not supernaturalism / Vincent Buranelli -- Edgar Allan Poe and the insanity plea / John Cleman -- Abnormality and the confusion of life and death / Charles E. May -- Madness in Poe's tales as a means of escape / Daniel Hoffman -- Confessing shrewdness to deny madness in Poe's stories / Christopher Benfey -- The mad chamber of the mind in Poe's poetry / Benjamin F. Fisher -- Death, sex, and horror in Poe's poetry / Edward H. Davidson -- Insanity as the way to salvation in "The pit and the pendulum" / James Lundquist -- Poe's fixation on the death of beautiful women / Karen Weekes -- "Ligeia" as a tale of obsession and hallucination / Roy P. Basler -- The obsession of the stalker / Kathleen Megan -- Patricide without remorse / Manuel Roig-Franzia -- Journey of a schizophrenic / Elyn R. Saks -- The insanity defense / Lara Bricker.