Poe's Stories Research Articles

The Power of Greenness: Poe in the Age of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Poe's short stories that, I argue, are relevant for the ecological concerns of the first decades of the twenty-first century: "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," "The Island of the Fay," and "The Domain of Arnheim." As the "greenness" in the title suggests, my purpose here is to reexamine selected stories by Poe from the perspective of ecocriticism, especially the latest developments in ecological thought that fully acknowledge the formidable threshold of the last phase of the Anthropocene called the Great Acceleration. I test the applicability of the interpretative frameworks of "dark ecology" and "ecological posthumanism" as well as the notions of "hyperobjects" and "scale effects" to these stories. I hope to demonstrate that "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" and "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" carry a clear ecological message that has become topical in the contemporary era of the global ecological crisis; "The Island of the Fay" prefigures the modern Gaia hypothesis; and "The Domain of Arnheim" subverts the utilitarian and exploitative approach to the natural environment, stemming from one of the foundational American myths: the errand into the wilderness.

Race on the Moon: Bodies, Spaces, and Science in Poe's and Locke's Moon Stories

ABSTRACT: I focus on the deployment of scientific discourses in Poe's "Hans Phaall—A Tale" (1835) and Richard Adams Locke's "Moon Hoax" (1835) in a shared racial project. I draw on Charles W. Mills's theory of the "Racial Contract," which posits that the historical invention of the "state of nature"—outside and opposed to the social contract of the civil state—created new categories of space and persons to be colonized. I argue that in Poe's and Locke's texts, the moon functions as such a space: conquered visually and epistemologically by science, it is also the home of unmistakably racialized lunar bodies. Figured as monstrous hybrids, the lunarians embody the texts' fears about racial mixing. Yet the tales offer different responses to these anxieties. Locke's fictionalized Sir John Herschel acts as an agent of the imperializing state, overseeing a lunar Eden of racial harmony, while Poe's Hans Phaall is a settler-outlaw whose identity threatens to merge with the native, hybridized lunarian. Contextualizing "Hans Phaall" within contemporaneous debates in racial science, I show that Hans and his lunarian conjure the specter of racial "degeneracy," casting doubt in the text on the social contract and its promise of human freedom.

Presentation of Space in E.A. Poe's Horror Stories

Introduction. The article is devoted to the consideration of the category of space in E.A. Poe's prose. On the example of horror stories, the role of artistic space in the author's linguistic picture of the world is determined and its key structural and semantic characteristics are revealed. The relevance of the research is connected with the growing interest in the ways and means of conceptualizing reality in a literary text, to the problems of the artistic genre and to the specifics of the author's idiostyle.Methodology and sources. The main research methods are semantic analysis, which consists in determining the key binary spatial oppositions, and functional-stylistic analysis, focused on identifying ways and means of representing artistic space in the works of E.A. Poe. The empirical basis of the study was stories written in the genre of horror literature: “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “William Wilson”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Berenice”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Oval Portrait”.Results and discussion. During the analysis, it was found that in E.A. Poe's stories, the representation of space is based on the inseparable relationship of its objective description by the author with his subjective perception of the hero/narrator and is characterized by an abundance of emotionally evaluative and perceptual vocabulary that verbalizes a large range of anxiety states. To the significant techniques of spatial modeling in the stories of E.A. Poe should be attributed to the polarization of space, realized in texts through semantic binary oppositions “open-closed”, “inside-outside”, “top-bottom”, as well as its deformation and hyperbolization.Conclusion. Space appears in E.A. Poe's stories as the most important parameter of conceptualization of reality. The surrounding world in the author's horror literature is inseparable from the images of Gothic literature, which is expressed not only in the use of the chronotope “castle”, in a number of texts transformed into the chronotope “bad house”, but also in the implementation of its motivic complex.

The Existence of The Main Character's Crime in The Short Stories of Berenice and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

This study examines the existence of crimes committed by the protagonists of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories "Berenice" and "The Tell-Tale Heart". This study aims to describe the crimes committed by the main character of both short stories. The data sources used are short stories, books, and website. In this study, we categorize the data into subchapters and analyze them. The authors use the theory of Maguire et al., 2012. Crime description. When analyzing research data using descriptive qualitative methods. According to research results, some of the acts included in the two short stories that fall under the category of crime are horrific.

The killer character in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories - a view from Hegel's philosophy of self-consciousness

Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are often evaluated based on his artistic talent – his ability to use special composition techniques such as the Single Effect technique, a literary theory proposed by Edgar Allan Poe himself, in order to extract highly effective emotional responses from readers, including the fight-or-flight response. This trend of research focuses on writing techniques, which are consistent with Edgar Allan Poe's conception of the importance of effects in artistic creation. Providing a different approach, this article appreciates his short stories in the aspect of philosophical thought that he conveyed in his works, in particular his ability to not only conclude the general rule from which criminal psychology was born, but also to suggest the way out of it. Finding anger, lust for murder, and terror of death, which constantly dominate the surface of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror works, the study tries to understand the core principle hidden in his works that caused such psychological phenomena. Guided by Hegel’s philosophy, this research explains that the desire to self-certainty in the primitive form – through fight to death – of self-consciousness is the psychological operation mechanism of the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s horror short stories.

Literary Devices in Edgar Allan Poe’s Crime Stories: An Analysis

This study focused on the literary devices used in Edgar Allan Poe’s crime stories. Edgar Allan Poe used certain literary techniques to convey information exactly and accurately. This study would like to examine "Literary Devices in Edgar Allan Poe's Crime Stories: An Analysis ". The devices used by the writer were to convey their ability to use it and identify the interpretations it stands for. This study also aimed to analyze the prevalent literary devices in the Crime Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The findings of this study served as a basis for proposing technologically aided materials for teaching literature. To meet the objective of this study, the researcher used content analysis to acquire accurate, factual, and systematic data that could provide an actual picture of the data set reviewed. It made use of qualitative study, used of content analysis as it looked into the literary devices utilized in the development of Edgar Allan Poe's selected short stories. The process of analyzing the author's work was anchored with literary devices. This study aimed to analyze the crime stories of Edgar Allan Poe, such as the following: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tell-Tale Heart. Specifically, this study sought to analyze the prevalent literary devices in the crime stories of Edgar Allan Poe. This includes the analysis of the selected short stories based on the different categories to get the literary devices employed and how extensive Edgar Allan Poe's crime stories are when analyzed.

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

The American Short Story and Me

The American Short Story and Me

Henri Justin Named Honorary Member of the Poe Studies Association

Professor Henri Justin is a scholar and translator whose lifelong devotion to Poe and the furthering of his studies should be praised for having always countered any exclusionary outlook in terms of investigative discipline, genre, or nativity.Professor Justin's doctoral dissertation, Poe dans le champ du vertige (Poe in the field of vertigo; Éditions Klincksieck, 1991), situates Poe as a pivotal figure in the turn from romanticism to structuralism. This work is telling of Justin's commitment to an international approach to Poe and to bringing non-English literary theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis into his own insights of textual elaboration around imaginary geometries and absent figures in Poe's short stories and the “cosmosis” of Eureka. In Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (With Poe until the end of prose; Éditions Galllimard, 2009), Justin continued to give his overview of Poe's prose, this time with the thesis of the “fault line”—how Poe worked in that fine edge and abyss between the two sides of several dualities, such as hallucinatory vision and analytical rationality, closure and dispersal, or narrator and writer. In 2012, Justin devoted the concise volume Edgar Allan Poe, poète malgré tout (Edgar Allan Poe, poet despite everything) to Poe's love of the poem per se, above and beyond all morality or duty toward reality. He has been working in recent years on a volume on Poe and Shakespeare—against a background of having taught U.S. and English literature of all periods and levels at several locations (Paris III, York University, Université d'Orléans)—along with several essays in which he continues to explore facets of Poe that have made him a sterling scholar, assuring the robustness and afterlife of Poe in France and elsewhere in the twenty-first century. This endeavor had its landmark right at the cusp of the millennium with the organization of the impeccable dossier Poe for the prestigious journal Europe in 2000.Additionally, Henri Justin has consecrated the last decade of his career to the retranslation of Poe's short stories, daring to offer alternative readings to Baudelaire's Poe translations, following a rationale he himself set out in his “Retranslating Poe into French” in the collective volume of essays Translated Poe (Lehigh University Press, 2014). Those of us who have worked with him on the latter and other endeavors have remained impressed with his unflinching professionalism and tender passion for the beauty of creative and well-researched ideas. As for his passion for Poe, he speaks well for himself in these remarkable lines from the conclusion of Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (my translation): “I maintain an insane admiration, an ever-renewed amazement for Poe's texts. One always feels there the stretched cable of the tightrope walker, the razor's edge, the letter's fold, that which retains no inscription but in whose proximity all signification enters the field of the attraction/repulsion of its opposite, drafting promises of senses…. If Poe continues to be read, and by all publics, it is because each reader perceives, more or less confusingly, that such folds of the text verge on an ultimate secret.” For his relentless advocacy of Poe and for his mentorship of a new generation of scholars and readers of Poe, we recognize Professor Justin with honorary membership in the Poe Studies Association.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

Influencing Daniel Hoffman: Eureka and the Seven Poes

Abstract Daniel Hoffman's evocative motif of seven versions of Poe emphasizes the frequent shifts and transitions in Poe's stories and poems, giving us an author in constant shift and transition. By keeping his own voice prominent in his book and connecting his own struggles and intellectual discoveries with Poe's texts, Hoffman tied his own identity to Poe's, making criticism a form of autobiography and self-expression. Hoffman emphasized Poe's growing interest in metaphysics and cosmology in his later work, and considered Poe's interest in these ideas crucial to an understanding of his philosophy. In “Eureka,” sometimes read as a satire, Hoffman focused on Poe's deeply serious tone, and argued that the work was best regarded as a symbolic allegory. Hoffman connected “Eureka” with Poe's inner drives, and analyzed it as a forceful expression of Poe's cosmological vision of a universe bound for an eventual collapse into utterly unified force existing beyond materiality.

Poe: Stories and Poems

Poe: Stories and Poems

From the Editor

From the Editor

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy:Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story Wanlin Li* (bio) Edgar Allan Poe's significance as a short story writer has been duly noted by critics. The voluminous criticism his stories received (and continue to receive) attests to the widely acknowledged importance of the writer. However, in comparison with his individual works, Poe's devotion primarily to short story writing in his brief but very productive career has elicited far less attention. Critics sometimes refer to the market potential of the genre as a strong motivation,1 which is at least partly true, but we must take into account nonfinancial considerations as well. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain why Poe decided to stay with the genre when other contemporary short story writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, gradually shifted to novel writing. Nor does the market theory of Poe's genre choice adequately explain why Poe showed such unswerving commitment to the genre in theory, praising its aesthetic value at every turn. To answer these questions, we need to place Poe's creative and critical efforts with respect to short story writing in a larger transatlantic context, in which American writers felt compelled to justify the distinctiveness and independence of American literature. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that Poe embraced the idea of a national literature as eagerly as many renowned literary nationalists, but instead of advocating thematic localization, Poe supported formal innovation, and turned to the short story as the primary [End Page 164] medium through which he could achieve his individualized ambitions for American literature. Understanding Poe's idiosyncratic vision for American literature has consequences for interpreting his literary theories and practices. Poe's aesthetic theory emphasizes the unity of effect and proposes a compositional model characterized by strong authorial control as a means for achieving such unity. Specifically, in order to produce a premeditated effect on the reader, the author needs to orchestrate his or her narrative resources in perfect coordination and leave nothing to chance. This compositional model gives the author the greatest advantage when he/she operates in a short medium. As a result, it allows Poe to foreground the generic merits of the short story in comparison with its British rival, the serialized novel (see the last section for a more nuanced argument and analysis). The latter's discursiveness, in Poe's eyes, greatly undermines its aesthetic quality. Governed by a new aesthetics, the short story stands for a literary medium through which American literature can achieve generic distinction. Not surprisingly, Poe's own creative efforts were geared towards demonstrating the power of such an aesthetic model, namely, how a writer can craft his or her stories in particular ways to produce vivid effects on the reader. Among the various strategies Poe designed for this purpose, ambiguity seems to be a most unlikely (though not infrequent) choice, since ambiguity,2 referring to the coexistence of mutually exclusive meanings, seems, on the surface, to work against the unity of effect. But if we recognize Poe's underlying desire for control, we would realize that ambiguity actually works for Poe's purpose, since it strengthens authorial control by way of forcing the reader to grapple more with parallel interpretive possibilities. In other words, in cases of ambiguity, Poe seeks the unity of effect not at the level of stable meaning, but at the level of making the reader aware of instability. To illustrate how ambiguity works in specific contexts, I offer my readings of several of Poe's fantastic stories, including "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson," in analyses that foreground the irresolvable nature of their ambiguity, before I move on to interpret the significance of the ambiguity in relationship to Poe's aesthetic theory and his nationalistic ambition to outstrip British literature. My readings will hopefully bring an end to the efforts to resolve the apparent ambiguity in Poe's fantastic stories, as critics recognize how ambiguity serves the author's larger theoretical and historical goals. [End Page 165] The Irresolvable Ambiguity in "Ligeia" The ambiguity in "Ligeia" has been a source of continuing controversy in the critical history of...

The Voyeur in the Confessional: Reader, Hoax, and Unity of Effect in Poe's Short Fiction

ABSTRACT: Poe's short fiction tends toward extremes—toward the grotesque and arabesque. This crowd-pleasing (or crowd-horrifying) content plays within carefully designed formal structures that complicate the act of reading and draw attention to "the reader," a figure of some interest to Poe's critical essays. I argue that the play between content and form in Poe, coupled with his ideas of readership, exposes a series of traps within many of his tales. Poe's stories draw the reader into an active role responsive to moral problems before shifting ground and rendering a moral response difficult, impossible, or paradoxical. Through the confessional mode in particular, Poe guides readers into positions that extend the work of the tale beyond the fictional realm, transmuting his stories into practical jokes or complex moral problems. The visibility of these jokes and problems, however, and their deliberate layering into so many of Poe's works, suggest an author working to prepare his audience for a specific flavor of hoax. By blurring the boundaries of the short story, and perhaps even finding ways to undermine its shortness, Poe opens a relationship between himself, his "reader," and whatever human being happens to actually be holding a copy of his tales. Poe's famous "unity of effect" unfolds through the creation of a predictable, synthetic commonality between author, reader, and audience.

The Characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Stories

This paper focuses on the four basic characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories. They are mysterious atmosphere, intriguing plots, familiar characters and particular settings. Then the functions of these characteristics are also presented. Poe tried his best to create the nervous and mysterious atmosphere, which can arouse readers’ first sight loving of the stories by using the crime solving and the puzzles unraveling.

Immersive theatre and the aesthetics of decadence: on the ruined worlds of Punchdrunk, SHUNT and Hammer Film Productions

ABSTRACTThis article considers how an aesthetics of decadence underpins approaches to design and audience engagement in work by Punchdrunk, SHUNT and Hammer Film Productions. Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death (2007–08) invited wandering audiences to inhabit the ruinous landscapes of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, recognised posthumously as ‘decadent’ fiction. SHUNT's The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face (2014) guided promenading audiences through a series of discarded shipping containers, each containing a lonesome occupant appearing in a state of disturbing physical decay – a dystopian reflection, perhaps, on the decadence of capitalism. And Hammer Film Productions’ Hammer House of Horror Live – The Soulless Ones (2017) staged a macabre homage to Hammer Horror films, complete with necromancy, blood-sucking vampires and orgiastic rituals. In this article, I explore how each performance, in its own way, gestures towards a decadent imagination identified and unpacked in light of criticism that informed its evolution in the nineteenth century, alongside more recent analysis that has reset the parameters of its study. This article also presents a challenge to scholarship that narrows focus to the enervating qualities of immersive theatre by considering ruination and decay as important themes informing the design of each performance, and the engagement of audiences both with and within ruined environments both actual and artificial. I argue that the decadent imagination is of much relevance to the study of aesthetics and politics in work that either sensationalises or questions its atomising tendencies, and that such work has much to offer to how decadence is understood, not just as a mutable concept, but as a radical practice.

THE DEAD-LIVING-MOTHER: MARIE BONAPARTE'S INTERPRETATION OF EDGAR ALLAN POE'S SHORT STORIES.

Princess Marie Bonaparte is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis, remembered for her crucial role in arranging Freud's escape to safety in London from Nazi Vienna, in 1938. This paper connects us to Bonaparte's work on Poe's short stories. Founded on concepts of Freudian theory and an exhaustive review of the biographical facts, Marie Bonaparte concluded that the works of Edgar Allan Poe drew their most powerful inspirational force from the psychological consequences of the early death of the poet's mother. In Bonaparte's approach, which was powerfully influenced by her recognition of the impact of the death of her own mother when she was born-an understanding she gained in her analysis with Freud-the thesis of the dead-living-mother achieved the status of a paradigmatic key to analyze and understand Poe's literary legacy. This paper explores the background and support of this hypothesis and reviews Bonaparte's interpretation of Poe's most notable short stories, in which extraordinary female figures feature in the narrative.