🌸Name: Payal chudasama
🌸Sem: 3
🌸Batch: 2019-20
🌸Roll no: 16
🌸Submitted by: smt.Gardi Department of English MKBU
🌸Paper name : The American literature
🌸Course: M.A. English
🌸Topic: Introduction about Edgar Allan Poe's stories
🌸 Enrollment no: 2o69108420200005
🌸 Email I'd: chudasmapayal1997@gmail.com
☆ Introduction about Edgar Allan Poe :
He was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. He is also generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.Poe was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
☆ Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style:
Edgar Allan Poe has a unique and dark way of writing. His mysterious style of writing appeals to emotion and drama. Poe’s most impressionable works of fiction are gothic. His stories tend to have the same recurring theme of either death, lost love or both.
For example, in the short story ” The Cask of Amontillado” opens with a first person narrator (Montresor) who speaks of his plan to kill Fortunato. Montresor states,”I must not only punish, but punish with impunity” (Poe 144) Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery and terror and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words. Poe uses a subtle style, tone, subconscious motivation of characters and serious themes to shift his readers towards a demented point of view. This is the unique tactics Poe utilizes that makes him an impressionable writer and poet.
Edgar Allan Poe’s inspiration came from a women who lived in England named Elizabeth Barrett . Elizabeth Barrett had written a work called “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”. Poe had dedicated another one of his works “The Raven” to Elizabeth because he had admired “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” so much. Poe’s admiration for “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” came from its “fierce passion” and “delicate imagination.”(Museum) Barrett felt privileged due to the high respect the people of England held for Poe. Barrett stated,”There is poetry in the man, though, now and then seen between the great gaps of bathos. . . the “raven” made me laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people; Your ‘Raven’ has produced a sensation, a “fit horror” here in England; Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music; I hear of persons haunted by the “Nevermore,” and one acquaintance of mine who has the misfortune of possessing a “bust of Pallas” can never bear to look at it in the twilight.”(Museum). The two had created a connection to each other through works. Poe inspiration came from this connection, thriving him to compete with her while falling in love with her.
☆ Edgar Allan Poe's stories:
《1》The Fall of the House of Usher":
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.Poe was inspired to write “The Fall of the House of Usher” by his own life as well as the life of his child-bride Virginia, especially the events of Virginia's death, which had sent Poe into deep depression and inspired many of his tales and poems.The story takes place in the Usher family mansion, which is isolated and located in a “singularly dreary tract of country.” The house immediately stirs up in the narrator “a sense of insufferable gloom,” and it is described as having “bleak walls,” “vacant eye-like windows,” and “minute fungi overspread
A striking similitude between the brother and the sister now first arrested my attention.
The narrator mentions that the Usher family, though an ancient clan, has never flourished. Only one member of the Usher family has survived from generation to generation, thereby forming a direct line of descent without any outside branches. The Usher family has become so identified with its estate that the peasantry confuses the inhabitants with their home.
The narrator finds the inside of the house just as spooky as the outside. He makes his way through the long passages to the room where Roderick is waiting. He notes that Roderick is paler and less energetic than he once was. Roderick tells the narrator that he suffers from nerves and fear and that his senses are heightened. The narrator also notes that Roderick seems afraid of his own house. Roderick’s sister, Madeline, has taken ill with a mysterious sickness perhaps catalepsy, the loss of control of one’s limbsthat the doctors cannot reverse. The narrator spends several days trying to cheer up Roderick. He listens to Roderick play the guitar and make up words for his songs, and he reads him stories, but he cannot lift Roderick’s spirit. Soon, Roderick posits his theory that the house itself is unhealthy, just as the narrator supposes at the beginning of the story.
Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the tombs below the house. He wants to keep her in the house because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific examination, since her disease was so strange to them. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. The narrator also realizes suddenly that Roderick and Madeline were twins. Over the next few days, Roderick becomes even more uneasy. One night, the narrator cannot sleep either. Roderick knocks on his door, apparently hysterical. He leads the narrator to the window, from which they see a bright-looking gas surrounding the house. The narrator tells Roderick that the gas is a natural phenomenon, not altogether uncommon.
The narrator decides to read to Roderick in order to pass the night away. He reads “Mad Trist” by Sir Launcelot Canning, a medieval romance. As he reads, he hears noises that correspond to the descriptions in the story. At first, he ignores these sounds as the vagaries of his imagination. Soon, however, they become more distinct and he can no longer ignore them. He also notices that Roderick has slumped over in his chair and is muttering to himself. The narrator approaches Roderick and listens to what he is saying. Roderick reveals that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and believes that they have buried Madeline alive and that she is trying to escape. He yells that she is standing behind the door. The wind blows open the door and confirms Roderick’s fears: Madeline stands in white robes bloodied from her struggle. She attacks Roderick as the life drains from her, and he dies of fear. The narrator flees the house. As he escapes, the entire house cracks along the break in the frame and crumbles to the ground.
《2》The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) A story of revenge:
This short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book. The story, set in an unnamed Italian city at carnival time in an unspecified year, is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him. Like several of Poe's stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around a person being buried alive.in this case, by immurement. As in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", Poe conveys the story from the murderer's perspective.
Montresor invites Fortunato to sample amontillado that he has just purchased without proving its authenticity. Fortunato follows him into the Montresor family vaults, which also serve as catacombs. For unknown reasons, Montresor seeks revenge upon Fortunato and is actually luring him into a trap. At the end of the story, the narrator reveals that 50 years have passed since he took revenge and Fortunato's body has not been disturbed.
《3》"The Gold Bug" (1843) :
"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1843. The plot follows William Legrand, who was bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears that Legrand is going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator, who agrees to visit his old friend.
《4》"The Purloined Letter"
This short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt".
☆Conclusion:
Poe may be said to have reached a point in his critical thinking wherein he saw that effect as the object of a writer's art is produced by an appreciation of the orderly nature and working of law, and he felt that the secret of impressive writing lies in the use of natural processes.As regards the stages by which he reached this conclusion, it is apparent that the particular interests he found in his reading came to transmute themselves in his mind into one consistent way of thinking. Each of these interests, we have seen, has played its part in making his literary theory, a theory which guided his choice of subject-matter and formed his technical method.
☆ work citation:
Bittner, William (1962), Poe: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Rosenheim, Shawn James (1997), The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-0-8018-5332-6.
Poe, Edgar Allan, Arthur Hobson Quinn, and Edward Hayes O'Neill. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: With Selections From His Critical Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1992.
Bloom, Harold. Edgar Allan Poe's "the Tell-Tale Heart" and Other Stories. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009.
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