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Gothic literature edgar allan poe5/9/2023 ![]() Plagued his whole life by scandals and rumours, his writing style was psychologically thrilling, though likely reflected his own inner turmoil. "My life has been a whim, an impulse, a passion, a yearning for solitude, a mockery of the things of this world," wrote Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). ![]() His legacy today remains focused on his tales of terror and haunting lyric poetry. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the genre of science fiction, though Poe made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Most famous for his narrative works such as The Raven and the Tell Tale Heart, Poe has been described as the father of Gothic literature. Hartshorn daguerreotype of Poe (1848), public domain image (bottom): title page for Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol 1 (1840), Wikimedia Commons.The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures images of madmen, murderers and mysterious women who return from the dead. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. For more horrific recommendations, see our pick of the greatest Gothic horror novels. įor more American literature, discover these classic movie adaptations of American novels. Most of Edgar Allan Poe’s best short stories are available in an excellent affordable annotated edition as The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (Penguin Classics). Learn about his classic poem ‘To Helen’ here. Go and have your spine chilled with this classic tale.Ĭontinue your interesting Poe odyssey with some of his prophecies that came true and some of the more outlandish facts about Poe’s life. The story combines the Gothic house, the old aristocratic family on its last legs, the idea of the dead returning to life, and various other hallmarks of classic Gothic fiction. Although it’s often called the first detective story, there are a number of other candidates for this honour, as we revealed in our short history of detective fiction.Īnother story which, like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, might be called a Gothic novel in miniature, ‘ The Fall of the House of Usher‘ is regularly named one of Poe’s best stories. We won’t offer spoilers here as to the story’s surprising resolution, but suffice to say that ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ went a long way towards creating the locked-room mystery genre of detective stories. Auguste Dupin, as a ‘very inferior fellow’). One of the first modern detective stories, this – and ‘The Purloined Letter’ – clearly influenced Conan Doyle in his creation of Sherlock Holmes (who, in the first novel in which he appears, refers to Poe’s fictional detective, C. Like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, this is a story about guilt and remorse, and an interesting and ambiguous take on the ghost story. Thereafter, he will be ‘haunted’ by the cat – and his life is about the get much, much worse. If that isn’t horrific enough, the narrator, a violent alcoholic, then hangs the cat from a tree in his garden. He manages to see what the police failed to see – but to say more than that would be to reveal too much, so go in search of the missing letter here.Ī terrifying tale narrated by a man who drunkenly maims his pet black cat by gauging out one of its eyes (!). The police cannot find the letter in the blackmailer’s apartment, although they know it must be there somewhere – so Dupin, the independent detective, is consulted. It is a theme that countless later writers of detective fiction, notably Conan Doyle, would utilise and adapt. ![]() This story centres on an indiscreet love letter, which has been stolen in order to be used for blackmailing purposes. This is one of the first ever detective stories and, like ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, features the literary inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, C.
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