When searching for my secondary source, I used the terms “Balloon Hoax” and I found an excerpt from a book on JSTOR. This excerpt was a chapter titled “Poe’s “Balloon Hoax”” from a book called American Literature. It contained a well written analysis and comparison of the real Monck Mason’s account of his balloon trip to Poe’s hoax. I chose it because it was so specific to my primary source and it had a thorough analysis comparing the two works, highlighting specific portions where there are almost identical passages. Furthermore, this work shows how Poe melds the truth facts with the false ones since the Monck Mason’s account was entirely accurate. This source changed the way I was going to approach my topic because I originally intended on focusing on how society and the cultural beliefs of the audience influenced Poe’s work but instead I was inspired by this source to analyze how Poe feigned truths by mimicking many stylistic elements and facts from a true discovery.
Scudder, Harold H. “Poe’s “Balloon Hoax”” American Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 21. Durham: Duke UP, 1949. 179-90. JSTOR. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
This is a great source, Kristi! And it sounds like you’ve got some good ideas lined up about how you’re going to incorporate it into your own analysis, and use it to build up your own argument. Nice work.
The citation is a little off, because this is actually an article from a scholarly journal, not a chapter from a book. It’s so hard to tell online! But usually when you see “editions” and “volumes” like this it indicates a journal that comes out several times per year. Does that make sense? The info all looks good, just needs to be shuffled to match a journal article!