Poes Pervasive Influence (Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe)

Never Say Nevermore: Edgar Allan Poe's 10 Best Stories

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Poe's Pervasive Influence | Lehigh University Press

Should I pay a subscription fee to always have free shipping? No, you will enjoy unlimited free shipping whenever you meet the above order value threshold. Although not often described as such, "William Wilson" is a tour de force psychological case study of an unreliable narrator tortured by a deservedly conflicted sense of self. How about a slowly descending, foot-long razor ever-so-slowly descending from the ceiling, giving you plenty of time to think about how it will eventually and ever-so-slowly slice open down the middle?

And that's just a basic summary.

Here is a one of Poe's most fully realized attempts at "totality". Poe creates a complete atmosphere of terror, where the narrator and reader understands it's not random, his captors are very aware of the conditions they've created, making the tension difficult to endure. Where other stories describe, in often excruciating detail, the anguish inflicted on an overly sensitive individual, in this one Poe makes the reader acutely aware of their own senses: Another one that's easy to imagine Dostoyevsky studying, this time in the construction of his underground man Notes from Underground: As a study of horror, "The Tell-Tale Heart", perhaps Poe's most in famous story, seems tame to contemporary audiences.

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But as an examination of obsession and psychosis? The real fear an adult can derive from this story is not the narrator's brutality or even innocence, but his insistence that he's sane.

With understated irony, Poe decodes the self-deceived stratagem of our most dangerous sociopaths. Although if only considered an unrivaled allegory of death and its inevitability , that somewhat superficial analysis still sells this one short as a blistering critique of social stratification. Here Poe uses a rampant disease to illustrate not only the behaviors but attitudes of the haves toward the have-nots: A masterful clinic of the Gothic aesthetic ensues as different-colored rooms are described, the air of revelry undercut with hourly reminders of mortality, courtesy of the ebony clock.

Finally, there's the spectacle of a silent intruder who mockingly moves from room to room, until finally confronted by the unfortunate prince. And then, comeuppance courtesy of one of the great closing lines in literary history: Poe, at times, makes the Grunge and Goth movements look like an ecstasy-addled rave.

Poe's Pervasive Influence

His irredeemable spiritual desolation was rooted not in anything like the info-overload pressure of too many choices we confront today, or finding the perfect partner or job, but fear of poverty, hunger and the unremarkable ailments that preyed upon humanity for so many centuries before sufficient medical advancements were made. He lived in a time when even libraries might not have the information you needed, so you wrote it down or took to sea or went insane as a matter of principle. In "The Black Cat", when the narrator's abuse of the bottle becomes unmanageable, it seems not autobiographical so much as an expression of the author's greatest fear: Once more, it's tantalizing to contemplate the ways Dostoyevsky may well have been developing the possibilities of an irresistible perversity driving one to self-defeat which Poe himself expanded upon in "The Imp of the Perverse" in both The Double and Crime and Punishment.

If "The Masque of the Red Death" features one of the all-time great closing lines, "The Fall of the House of Usher" contains one of the most sublime opening passages: Practically every image, every action, every word is dedicated toward the invocation of dread, and the suspense careens toward a conclusion that is literally shattering in several senses of the word. The tale concerns itself with the narrator and his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, as well as his twin sister Madeline.

And yet the main character is the house itself. The narrator feels a palpable sense of dreariness and decay as he approaches the family mansion, a foreboding that comes full circle as the house collapses into itself in the final scene.

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

It's the effect the house has on its tenants, however, where Poe couples supernatural suspense with a human frailty to devastating effect. Sensitive to the point of intolerance to sound, Roderick has become an imploding specter of nervous energy and despair. As he confesses to his friend, "I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.

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With astonishing economy this story could -- and likely would, by a lesser writer -- have easily been stretched into a novel, albeit with lesser impact and effect , Poe manages to invoke his enduring preoccupation of live burial, split personalities, ruminate on the sentience of inanimate objects, and complicate the notions of art imitating life and vice versa, all while steadily orchestrating the ultimate confrontation twin vs.

Tragic and absurd as the events become, the narrator is content to leave it as a family matter, hastily escaping as the history of the house and its occupants sink into nothingness. We've discussed a perfect opening section and a perfect closing sentence; "The Cask of Amontillado" is just perfection, period. It represents the consummation of so many of Poe's aesthetic innovations, crafted so each sentence builds upon the next like an expertly tiered stone wall… , amping up the humor, irony and, finally, horror.

Not a word wasted, an image unnecessary, a line of dialogue inessential and yet, despite the formal symmetry at its heart, a mystery. What is the insult that drives Montresor's homicidal rage? It's never clear, and that only adds an element of menace. Is Montresor, like many of Poe's most inscrutable murderers, more or less insane?

Put another way, it's difficult to fathom, since he and Fortunato are still at least superficially cordial, any offense that would warrant live entombment.

Barbara Cantalupo Named Honorary Member of the Poe Studies Association

When Montresor insists that he is, in fact, a mason one of the delightful ironies, as he pulls out his trowel , it's easy to overlook Fortunato's offensive disbelief "You? Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.

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Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. The Edgar Allan Poe Review. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Barbara Cantalupo Named Honorary Member of the Poe Studies Association Philip Edward Phillips Honorary Membership is the highest award bestowed by the Poe Studies Association on individual members for significant and sustained contributions to the field of Poe studies and service to the association.

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