subordinate clauses - Use of a pronoun to refer to something that follows

This is the opening sentence from the Edgar Allan Poe short story 'The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar'.

Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion.

It seems to me that 'it' in this sentence is not a dummy 'it' but a pronoun that refers forward to the subordinate clause 'that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion.' We could rewrite the sentence as 'Of course I shall not pretend to consider that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion any matter for wonder .' The problem would be that 'consider that' is a common construction that utilises 'that' in a different way than is intended here (as introduction to a subordinate clause), so instead the pronoun 'it' is used to separate off the clause.

On the other hand, we could write 'That the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion, I shall, of course, not pretend to consider any matter for wonder.'

Does my analysis make sense, and are there many instances where a pronoun refers forward to something that occurs later in a sentence?

For instance--"I consider him damned, who refuses to submit to God" where there is no previous noun the pronoun 'him' refers to, but 'him' instead refers to the following subordinate clause 'who refuses to submit to God'. (Which raises the interesting case of a subordinate clause that modifies a pronoun that actually refers to the subordinate clause--but then, 'he who refuses to submit to God' would work the same way.)

Answer

You're talking about postcedents. An antecedent is a word/phrase which is referred back to in a later part of the sentence like "your tea" in "Drink your tea while it's hot."

If you said "While it's still hot, you should drink your tea", "your tea" becomes a postcedent.

http://english.edurite.com/english-grammar/postcedents.html#

In both cases, the pronoun ("it" in these examples) which refers back or forward to the antecedent/postcedent is called a pro-form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-form

The naming comes from "ante" meaning "before" (because the antecedent comes before the pro-form) and "post" meaning after (because the postcedent comes after the pro-form).

Postcedents are less commonly used, probably because when you see the pro-form (eg "it") you don't actually yet know what they're referring to, so it makes the sentence a bit harder to comprehend. I think they may be most commonly used when the postcedent is someone's name, like

"After hearing his alarm go off for the third time, Simon finally woke up".