While Poe relates these as true stories, as opposed to the works of his own imagination, one can't but read them also as the fantastical longing of husband wanting to deny death's ability to separate him from his beloved wife.
After Virginia died, Continue Reading...
Inductive reasoning leads Legrand to discover an encrypted message that he sets out to painstakingly decipher. Poe's detailed analysis of the cryptogram is quintessentially romantic, encouraging rational inquiry into seemingly supernatural phenomeno Continue Reading...
Tell-Tale Heart
As the class notes say, "Romanticism or Romantic movement is predominantly pre-occupied with Imagination -- an escape from the world of reality/pain. Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," ignores Romantic styles of fiction popular dur Continue Reading...
The supernatural is defining feature of gothic genres of gothic and horror. Supernatural motifs are also integral to Romanticism, especially as the supernatural is counterpoint to the natural. Romanticism reveals an uneasy relationship between scienc Continue Reading...
Arthur Miller or John Steinbeck or even Ernest Hemingway, and most likely he/she has heard the name, but cannot place it. Or, the response will be, "Isn't he a writer or something?" Ask someone in the field of literature the same question, and of co Continue Reading...
John Wesley Before Referencing
Supernatural tales of death and jealousy: Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and Robert Olen Butler's "Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot"
Both Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and Rob Continue Reading...
We see the creative mind at work in "The Fall of the House of Usher" as Poe creates a parallel between the house and Roderick. The suspense with this thriller is heightened with the fact that the narrator is inches from the same fate as Roderick. Th Continue Reading...
First, evil in Sleepy Hollow is more equating with a satirical view that, in this case, evil is a more benign humor, bumbling, caustic in disrupting the town, and, as it was in Ancient Greek and Roman drama, simply more of an irritant than planned Continue Reading...
A sea of buildings would cover the Island of Manhattan, and the iron tentacles of urbanization would extend outward over hundreds of square miles, even into distant Riverdale in Westchester County - the once rural site of Wave Hill. The picturesque Continue Reading...
Man of the Crowd
By Edgar Allan Poe (1840)
The story significantly depicts not only the preoccupation of the 17th hundred London issues and a trend brought by the progressive industrialization of time, but speaks so much relevance in our modern tim Continue Reading...