National Culture, Attribution, and the Politics of Style: Poe's Anti-Masonic Writing

Abstract: This paper examines the authorship of the Anti-Masonic satire Morganiana (1828), using a combination of traditional archival reasoning and computer-aided stylometric analyses to suggest Edgar Allan Poe as a potential author. The paper considers Poe's early years against the Anti-Masonic movement, exploring the movement's role in the formation of US national identity and locating its origins in the literary disputes of the Jacksonian era. It interrogates the intersection of conspiracy theories, literary production, and stylistic norms, drawing parallels between nineteenth-century Anti-Masonic rhetoric and contemporary digital conspiracism to demonstrate how conspiratorial reasoning is an output of aristocratic literary cultures, not a populist formation pitched against those cultures. By recontextualizing Morganiana as a possible artifact of Poe's juvenilia, the study advances ongoing debates about authorship, cultural politics, and the application of digital tools in literary scholarship, while cautioning against the uncritical adoption of computational methods divorced from political and archival considerations.