Edgar Alan Poe

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to American literature have become progressively more famous as the years have passed. As short fiction has become a more acknowledged genre in scholarly rounds, Poe's theories are revised with more passion. Although he dwelled a rather melancholy reality, Poe did know-how instants of joy, and yearned to arrest attractiveness through poetical form. Indeed, what he left behind for the scholarly world was his gifted genius, disclosed through his poetry, fiction, and criticism (Dayan, 44).

Character backgrounds and development of themes

Generally, Poe himself grouped his tales into two classes, that of the surreal, the supernatural, which he termed to be "arabesque," and the horrific, gruesome tales which he deserving "grotesque," as when he released his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840.

Poe's extensive work was the forerunner for much of the publications that was to pursue, composing research fiction before Jules Verne, or creating the first detective tales boasting the infinitely observant Dupin, before Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. As with Poe, the narrator of these subsequent tales is the "sidekick" of the bright detective mind. Poe's satire in "The Gold-Bug" or "The Man That Was Used Up" arrives before another well renowned south polite man who came to reside in the North, Mark Twain (Elmer, 58).

However, these period denote a certain scholarly method or pitch and manage not specifically disclose the far-ranging concepts that his tales pursue. Some aim upon death, as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," or "The Premature Burial." Several tales aim upon misdeed or actions of killing, "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," or "The Cask of Amontillado," while Poe focuses on the method of explaining a misdeed in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and ...