edgar allan poe research paper topics

113 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics & Examples

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🏆 Best Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics & Examples

👍 interesting edgar allan poe research paper topics, 💡 most interesting edgar allan poe topics to write about, ❓ research questions about edgar allan poe.

• The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique The outstanding character in the tale, who is also the narrator, attracts a lot of attention from the readers. The narrator forms the basis of the tale.
• “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe He entombs the corpse in the basement of his house, and when the police unexpectedly show up at his house, he inadvertently leads them to the corpse.
• Edgar Allan Poe – American Literature The main themes that are evident in his work are the themes of death and love. He speaks of a chilling wind from the sky that emerged resulting in the death of her wife.
• “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Although the plot is different in each of these poems, both Annabel Lee and The Raven share the themes of death and lost love, as well as the symbolic language.
• Literary Devices in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe As such, Montresor finds his companion’s “transgression” worthy of the cruelest death, and believes that his cause is so right that he deserves to get away with it. Hyperbole There is a sense of this […]
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Poem Analysis Expecting the sound to be caused by the wind, the speaker opens the window, through which a raven flies into the room.
• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The Role of the Narrator The role of the narrator of the story The Fall of the House of Usher is great indeed; his rationality and his ability to represent the events from the side of an immediate participant of […]
• The Single Effect in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado The very first words uttered by the author at the start of the story carried the hook necessary to reel the reader into the story with the desired effect.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Views on Madness in “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” The lesson that can be learned through the interface of this Poe’s short story is that no one can be trusted due to the lack of background information and deceptive practices.
• Literature Symbols in “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe In spite of the fact that there are many symbols of different types in Poe’s “The Raven”, such symbols of darkness and depression as December, the raven, the Night’s Plutonian shore, and the repetition of […]
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Story “The Black Cat” For instance, when the main character looked at the image of the cat on the wall, he saw it as “gigantic”; however, whether the size of the animal was an expression of paranormal or the […]
• Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Literary Career Edgar died in Baltimore and the cause of his death was not clear. Edgar, in his element, overcame challenges and established a literary legacy that has stood the test of time.
• The Poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe The beginning of the poem reveals the narrator’s feelings toward Annabel Lee, determining the theme and the mood of the verse: “a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee; […]
• Revenge Theme in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe He, therefore, decides to seek revenge, but he wants to be careful in order not to risk his life. Fortunato seems to be fond of wine against Montresor, and he decides to use this as […]
• “Black Cat” a Story by Edgar Allan Poe In turn, the use of various stylistic devices helps the writer create a sense of suspense and show the immense moral tension that the main character struggles with.
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Poe This metaphor is necessary to show that the feeling of guilt distorts his perception of reality. This is one of the details that can be distinguished.
• The “Eldorado” Poem Analysis by Edgar Allan Poe The structure of the poem is AABCCB. Edgar Allan Poe vastly uses metaphors and sight sensory in the poem.
• Edgar Allan Poe: ”The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” In this discourse two of his famous short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” are studied in an attempt to better understand the use of symbolism, the literary tool of irony, and […]
• Analysis of “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe After having lost his cat when a fire broke in his house, he felt a great need for another pet, same as that of Pluto, his pet cat.”This, then, was the very creature of which […]
• “The Black Cat” Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe The purpose of the short story has long been a subject of debate.”The Black Cat,” while having some characteristics of the horror genre, presents a psychoanalytical approach to the mind of a psychopath, a scrutiny […]
• “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe The neighbors who heard the scuffle that ensued and went to the ladies house gave evidence to the police, and in as much as most of them agree on a great extent to the events […]
• Edgar Allan Poe: Interpretation of “The Raven” One of the suggestions that dominate Poe’s talent in writing “The Raven” was the succession of terrible events the author encountered in his life.
• Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe portrays the Usher family as struggling to survive albeit in a gloomy manner that involves degradation, disease, and death.”The Fall of the House of Usher” is […]
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” & “The Cask of Amontillado”: Summaries, Settings, and Main Themes As the narration progresses, fear arises in the reader or viewer, and finally, something horrific happens.”The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of the Amontillado” share all of the features above, as […]
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis A poem that deals with family relationships and explain the poem’s meaning The poem is heavily based on the relationship between the narrator and Lenore with their affection being the subject of the whole poem.
• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry Analysis It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with […]
• Edgar Allan Poe: Literary Devices and Their Meaning The purpose of his style, ornate and yet concise, of the grotesque characters, the growing tension in the narrative is “the greatest possible effect on his readers”.
• Narrative Perspectives in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” One of the reasons why the story The Cask of Amontillado and the poem My Last Duchess are being commonly referred to, as such that represent a particularly high value, is that the narrative perspective […]
• Imagery Use in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe The story utilizes graphical language and imagery in the development of a sense of deceptive and persuasive nature and circumstances in the expansion of the symbolic approach of sustaining a condition of suspense. The imagery […]
• Dark Humor in The Cask of Amontillado Essay The use of horror and humor in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the literary features that the author uses to constructs the story.
• The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe Poetry The head is alluded to the palace, while all the evil spirits mentioned represent the thoughts of a human beings mind.
• Jury Defense and “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe As a member of the jury sitting in on the trial of Montressor, I feel it is necessary for me to explain the reasons why the jury came to the conclusion it did.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s and Herman Melville Comparison To this end, the current paper is a comparative review of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Melville’s “Billy Budd”.
• Mini Anthology: Poe Edgar Allan and Dickson Emily’ Works The other story that Poe Allen has written is “The fall of the House of Usher” whereby the main theme is about the haunted house, which is crumbling and this aspects brings out a Gothic […]
• Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado Although the revelation of the character of Montressor was done indirectly, the fact that he was also the narrator of the story enabled readers to have access to his thoughts and feelings.
• Gothic Romanticism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “The Birthmark” In the film “The Black Swan” directed by Darren Aronofsky, Nina struggles to fit into the ultimate role of the play “The Swan Lake”, as the Black Swan, even though she is comfortable playing the […]
• Literary Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” The poem is imbued with a melancholy mood, which is stated in the first lines of the work. This is the main point of the poem.
• Irony in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe As the atmosphere of gaiety during the carnival changes to the horror from the catacombs beneath Montresor’s palazzo the reader ascertains that the carnival was a prelude created by the author to admit the drastic […]
• The Gothic-Romantic Story, “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe It is also known that vampires typically rest during the day only to rise in the light of the moon. Thus, to my mind, the image of Poe’s Ligeia is strongly associated with a vampire […]
• Gothic Romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe When the thought of today, the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as the master of the short story and the psychological thriller.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Fear of Premature Burial For instance, in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat the police arrive and stimulate a desire on the part of the narrator to confess his crime and undergo punishment from the state.
• Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe Literature Analysis He tries to justify his actions, and show that he is not a bad person. Most importantly, he tries to show that he is not a mad man.
• Montressor in The Cask of Amontillado In addition, Montressor said that he was a friend of Fortunato but he seemed to have acted out of character when he assumed the habits and characteristics of a cold blooded killer.
• Literary Approaches in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” In this story, the protagonist, whose wife was Ligeia, tells of the happiness he found in his marriage to her before her untimely death.
• “The Raven” Poem by Edgar Allen Poe The raven’s “Nevermore” throughout the poem is a repetition that enhances the poem’s lyrical mood and emphasizes the main character’s hopelessness.
• Edgar Allan Poe: Brief Biography Sublime’s exploration of the darkest sides of the human soul and psyche has contributed greatly to the development of the horror genre.
• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe Ideally, using the subjective understanding of Poe’s work, it is possible to evaluate some of the qualities of the story. At the same time, the setting of the story creates a lot of suspense for […]
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Life From Primary Sources I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife [in 1847]. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a […]
• Conciseness in “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe The main arguments towards the development of the contemporary short story will be discussed in this essay, and the similarities between these visions and the statements in “The Tell-Tale Heart” will be described.
• Epilogue to “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe It is that the murder is a reason for the fifty-two years-old disappearance of the respected Fortunato, and the Montresor’s guild is undeniable”.
• “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe The plot is told from the first person as the pronoun “I” is used and the story is told in the past tense.
• The Rejection in the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe The main character depicts his nervousness and the feeling of fear and anger caused by the old man’s vulture eye. He thinks that the police are simply making a mockery of his horror and points […]
• Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” Review The tension intensifies with every stanza till the third one from the end after which the narrator understands the senselessness of the situation in searching for the answers for his questions in the raven’s “nevermore”.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: Revenge, Hypocrisy, and Society On the day of the carnival Montresor goes looking for Fortunato and finds him a bit tipsy and it is then that he tells him of how he had acquired a rare kind of amontillado […]
• Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe: Synthesized Approach There are certain commonalities between the artistic and symbolic representations of both writers/directors, especially in their representation of the madness and paranoia that exists in the world when people are placed in isolation and the […]
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Style of Fictional Works Minister D walked in and saw the contents of the letter, produced another copy that almost looked like the stolen one, and placed it next to the important letter.
• Edgar Allen Poe’s Influence on Hitchcock From the above discussion, it can be said that Hitchcock’s work was greatly influenced by the work of Poe particularly in building the audience’s suspense and manipulating their attention.
• Narration and Symbolism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” The narrator of the story performs the role of the main rhetorical device that ensures the disclosure of the main theme of the story.
• “Annabel Lee” the Work by Edgar Allen Poe The narrative description of the elegy expresses the narrator’s undying love for ‘Annabel Lee’ detailing a love which had originated many a year ago in the unidentified ‘kingdom by the sea’.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher In particular, we may analyze such novellas as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Edgar Allen Poe’s Madeline’s and Ligeia’s Animas Examining works such as the short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” reveals much of Poe’s character through the form of his anima.
• Inside the Narrator’s Mind: “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe It is significantly the working of the inner self or the perpetual threat of the unconscious to the conscious that leads the protagonist to the ultimate confession of the crime even when he is not […]
• Military Career of Edgar Allan Poe Often overlooked, however, is the story of Poe’s life: the heartbreak, financial struggles, success, mysterious death, and of course his military career. The success of the ominous poem gave Poe a steady income and cemented […]
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Allan Edgar Poe This provides us with the clue, as to the discursive significance of the old man’s eye, as one of the story’s foremost motifs.
• Edgar Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Ligeia” His method of murder signifies what he knows of stone masonry, of which he is a member, instead of the Masons, which is a secret organization that Fortunato is a member of.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd” Story The structure of the tale, its manner of narration, and the minimal number of main characters are only some of the features that make “The Man in the Crowd” one of the most memorable short […]
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Life, Poems, Short Stories The recognition of his works is based mainly on the uniqueness of the themes and characters the author created, as well as his excellent command of the language and exceptional imagery and style.
• Edgar Allan Poe, an American Romanticism Writer Poe’s three works “The fall of the house of Usher”, “the Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death” describe his dedication to literature and his negative attitudes towards aristocracy.
• “Annabel Lee” Multi Rhythmic Poem by Edgar A. Poe Therefore, the author’s works created a powerful impact on the establishment of a connection between content and literary form. Thus, Poe’s writings possess the power to show the links between a concept and a form […]
• “Ligeia” a Book by Edgar Allan Poe Since the fact that the narrator is not in full control of the mind, this is made very apparent by the author, it could mean that Ligeia and Rowena are really the same people and […]
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe Literature Analysis Although “The Fall of the House of Usher” is traditionally believed to be a timeless horror story and a representation of the deepest human fears, it can also be viewed both as a product of […]
• Edgar Poe’s Annabel Lee: Narrative Text Analysis As death and mortality along with love make the key themes of the poem, it will be reasonable to suggest that the mood of the latter is quite dark, despite the lyrical tone and the […]
• Edgar Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” Literature Analysis The main character in “The Cask of Amontillado” is Montresor with Fortunato being a minor character in the short story. Also, Montresor is the story’s narrator, and a lot of details about his character are […]
• Comparison of Works by Stephen Crane and Allan Poe Although Crane’s stories are imaginary, the reader can picture houses and the community in ‘The Monster’ or the town of Yellow Sky in ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’ He vividly describes the living conditions […]
• Evans, Walter. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Poe’s Theory of the Tale. In this article, Walter Evans discusses the narrative style of Edgar Allan Poe and speaks about the peculiarities of such a short story as The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Edgar Allan Poe: Analyzing Literature Works Paying attention to such pieces of writing The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, Annabel Lee, and The Raven it is possible to say that the main idea of these […]
• The Investigation of Ethical Issues in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Pond The secondary problem is related to an ethical dilemma with regards to the responsibility of the husband to provide and care for the family.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Themes Coincidentally, he dedicated his first wave of writing to themes of innocence and beauty coupled with “Love and Joy as dynamic life values in the poet’s feeling for the potentiality of the harmony of mind […]
• The Style and Themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature In the first stanza, the departure of the lover marks the end of their love, while the second stanza uses the dropping of sand as symbolic to the passing of time in an hour glass.
• The Tell-Tale Heart Essay However, when the police came to the Old Man’s house he gives himself away to the police because he hears the heart of the old man beating behind the floorboard and this incident may suggest […]
• A Perfect Place for a Perfect Crime: Creating the Impeccable Setting It must be admitted that with his unusual gift of depicting the most petrifying environment so that it immediately rises in front of the reader’s eyes, Poe creates the perfect setting in The Cask of […]
• Poe’s Favorite Subject Matter Is Death This is not an exaggerated statement judging from terms and imagery used in at least four of his popular works such as The Cask of Amontillado; The Black Cat; The Tell-Tale Heart; and The Masque […]
• Poe’s life and how it influenced his work He feels privileged to have such a creature in his room and the fact that the raven answers his question of what its name is with the word “Nevermore”, adds to his excitement.
• The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) This section tackles the main characters of the story and as aforementioned, the narrator and the old man are the only central characters in the story.
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence Literature?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Keep the Reader in Suspense?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Misguide the Reader in His Story “The Black Cat”?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Dreams to Portray Terror and Mirror the Narrator’s Sense of Reality?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Create Horror in “The Pit and the Pendulum”?
• How Edgar Allan Poe Defines American Literature?
• How Edgar Allan Poe Explores Similarities Between Love and Hate in His Work?
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe & Jack London Deal With Death in Selected Short Stories?
• How Edgar Allan Poe’s Work Is Affected by His Predecessors?
• How Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings Illuminate His Upbringing?
• Was Edgar Allan Poe a Jingleman?
• What Influenced Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe So Great?
• Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?
• Who Was William Wilson in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe?
• Why Does Edgar Allan Poe Favors Death and Terror Over Other Literary Genres?
• Edgar Allan Poe: Crazy Drunk or Brilliant Literalist?
• Edgar Allan Poe: Strange Dreamer or True Genius?
• What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Last Five Words?
• What Is Edgar Allan Poe Most Famous For?
• What Does Edgar Allan Poe Suffer From?
• Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write about Death?
• What Are Five Interesting Facts about Edgar Allan Poe?
• Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Marry His 13-Year-Old Cousin?
• Did Edgar Allan Poe Write With a Cat on His Shoulder?
• What Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Famous Poem?
• What Is the Meaning of Poe’s “The Raven”?
• What Language Did Edgar Allan Poe Use to Create Atmosphere and Suspense?
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Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

This page provides students with a rich tapestry of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics . From the haunting beauty of his poetry to the chilling narratives of his short stories, Poe’s works present a myriad of research opportunities. This comprehensive guide not only delves into a categorized list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics but also offers insights into choosing the perfect Poe topic and crafting an impeccable research paper. Additionally, iResearchNet’s unparalleled writing services are showcased, promising meticulous research and tailored writing solutions. Dive deep into the Gothic allure of Poe, and embark on an academic journey with iResearchNet’s expert guidance.

Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic style and dark themes have continuously intrigued scholars and avid readers alike for generations. For those seeking to delve deep into the recesses of Poe’s mind, here is a comprehensive list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics spanning across various facets of his work:

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, 1. poe’s poetry.

• An analysis of the rhythmic patterns in The Raven .
• The exploration of love and loss in Annabel Lee .
• Ulalume – A journey through grief and remembrance.
• The dark romanticism of A Dream Within a Dream .
• Symbolism in The Bells .
• The personification of death in The Conqueror Worm .
• Navigating the landscapes of Eldorado .
• Themes of sorrow and yearning in Lenore .
• Imagery and melancholy in The Sleeper .
• To Helen and the ideals of beauty.

2. Tales of the Macabre

• Psychological terror in The Tell-Tale Heart .
• The thin line between sanity and insanity in The Black Cat .
• The descent into madness in The Cask of Amontillado .
• Death and disease in The Masque of the Red Death .
• Exploration of guilt in William Wilson .
• The Fall of the House of Usher and the Gothic tradition.
• The pursuit of the unknown in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar .
• The torment of the soul in Ligeia .
• Themes of revenge in Hop-Frog .
• The intricate narrative of The Pit and the Pendulum .

3. Detective Fiction

• The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the birth of detective fiction.
• The analytical prowess of C. Auguste Dupin.
• The detective’s role in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt .
• Deductive reasoning in The Purloined Letter .
• Poe’s influence on the modern detective genre.
• Examination of crime in Poe’s detective tales.
• The development of sidekicks in detective fiction.
• The detective’s moral compass in Poe’s works.
• Female characters in Poe’s detective stories.
• The evolution of clues and red herrings in Poe’s mysteries.

4. Poe and the Supernatural

• Exploration of the afterlife in Morella .
• Ghosts and hauntings in Poe’s tales.
• The dichotomy of life and death in Berenice .
• The metaphysical in Silence – A Fable .
• Exploration of the soul in The Oval Portrait .
• Visions and prophecies in Poe’s works.
• The exploration of otherworldly realms.
• Portrayal of apparitions and spirits.
• The supernatural as a reflection of human psyche.
• Dreams and omens in Poe’s tales.

5. Poe’s Personal Life and Works

• The influence of Poe’s turbulent love life on his poetry.
• Tragedies of Poe: The deaths that shaped his tales.
• Poe’s relationship with alcohol and its reflection in his work.
• The financial struggles of Poe and their impact on his writings.
• Poe’s tumultuous relationship with the literary community.
• The mystery of Poe’s death: Theories and narratives.
• Poe’s years in Baltimore and their influence.
• Poe and his foster parents: A complicated bond.
• The influence of Poe’s academic life on his tales.
• Poe’s critiques and their influence on American literature.

6. Poe’s Literary Techniques

• Poe’s use of unreliable narrators.
• The symbolism of the Gothic in Poe’s works.
• The mastery of first-person narrative in Poe’s stories.
• Poe’s pioneering use of psychological horror.
• The recurring motif of the ‘eye’ in Poe’s tales.
• Exploration of sound, from the beating heart to the ominous raven.
• The role of nature in setting the mood in Poe’s works.
• The juxtaposition of beauty and decay in Poe’s prose.
• Poe’s portrayal of women: Idealization and objectification.
• Themes of confinement and entrapment in Poe’s narratives.

7. Poe’s Influence on Modern Literature

• Poe’s impact on 20th-century horror writers.
• The continuation of C. Auguste Dupin in Sherlock Holmes.
• Poe’s influence on contemporary gothic fiction.
• Adaptations of Poe in cinema and theater.
• Modern reimaginings of The Tell-Tale Heart .
• The legacy of The Raven in modern pop culture and more.
• The reinterpretation of Poe’s themes in graphic novels.
• Poe’s legacy in the genre of psychological thrillers.
• How contemporary poets have built upon Annabel Lee .
• The Fall of the House of Usher in modern architectural narratives.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

• Exploration of obsession in tales like The Tell-Tale Heart .
• Madness and sanity: The blurred lines in Poe’s narratives.
• Delving into paranoia in The Black Cat .
• Love, loss, and mourning in Poe’s poetic and prose works.
• The subconscious fears in The Premature Burial .
• The human psyche’s struggle with mortality.
• Guilt, conscience, and human nature in Poe’s writings.
• The role of memory in stories like Eleonora .
• The fine line between reality and illusion in Poe’s tales.
• Analyzing self-identity and duality in works like William Wilson .

9. Poe and the Victorian Era

• The portrayal of Victorian society in Poe’s works.
• Social conventions and restraints in Poe’s narratives.
• The influence of the Victorian Gothic on Poe’s tales.
• Victorian views on mortality and their reflections in Poe’s stories.
• The role of women in Poe’s Victorian narratives.
• Poe’s criticism of Victorian moral hypocrisy.
• Poe’s interaction with other Victorian writers.
• The role of science and reason in Poe’s Victorian tales.
• The Victorians’ fascination with the macabre and the supernatural.
• Poe’s view on Victorian advancements and industrialization.

10. Analysis of Selected Works

• A deep dive into The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .
• The many layers of The Descent into the Maelstrom .
• Isolation and despair in The Island of the Fay .
• The metaphysical quandaries of Eureka: A Prose Poem .
• Unraveling Tamerlane : Poe’s early hints at genius.
• Delving into the drama of Politian .
• Love and loss: An analysis of Bridal Ballad .
• The journey of self-discovery in Al Aaraaf .
• Dissecting the mysteries of MS. Found in a Bottle .
• The symbolism and depth of The Man of the Crowd .

Delving into Edgar Allan Poe’s vast realm of literary contributions is akin to embarking on a journey through layers of the human psyche, societal reflections, and transcendent themes. His works, suffused with intricate symbolism and profound emotion, continue to resonate powerfully with readers across the globe, even after centuries. These Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics serve as a window, offering a glimpse into the multifaceted world of Poe, where every narrative, be it prose or poetry, reveals a new dimension of understanding. By exploring these subjects, students not only immerse themselves in the richness of Poe’s genius but also engage in critical thinking, analytical assessments, and a deeper appreciation of literary artistry. As one ventures deeper into his narratives and poems, it becomes clear why Poe stands as an immortal pillar in the pantheon of literary greats.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Range of Research Paper Topics

Edgar Allan Poe, a name that evokes a mosaic of emotions – from eerie suspense to profound melancholy. Often hailed as the master of the macabre, Poe’s contributions to American literature span much more than just tales of horror and the uncanny. His works are a rich tapestry woven with intricate themes, unparalleled symbolism, and a deep understanding of the human psyche. This literary genius’s stories and poems have continually fascinated scholars, readers, and writers alike, offering a plethora of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics for literature enthusiasts to dive into.

To understand the vast range of research avenues in Poe’s works, one must first grasp the breadth of his literary portfolio. Although primarily recognized for his gothic tales, Poe was also an astute critic, an innovative poet, and a pioneer of the short story genre. He adeptly merged both European romanticism and American originality, resulting in a unique literary style that still stands unmatched.

The Enigmatic Poe

One of the enduring fascinations with Poe is his own life – as mysterious and tragic as some of his tales. Orphaned at a young age, battling personal demons, and facing numerous adversities, Poe’s tumultuous life deeply influenced his writings. Exploring the parallels between his personal experiences and his fictional worlds is a research area that continues to captivate scholars. His enigmatic death, still a mystery, is a testament to the lingering intrigue surrounding his life.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

Much ahead of his time, Poe delved deep into the complexities of the human mind. Stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat are not just tales of horror but profound psychological studies of guilt, paranoia, and mental descent. Analyzing the psychological undertones in his works provides a multi-dimensional approach to his stories, making them relevant even in modern psychoanalytical discussions.

Symbolism and the Supernatural

Poe’s tales are replete with symbols. Be it the hauntingly sentient House of Usher or the relentless Raven, Poe used symbols to enhance the atmospheric dread of his stories and to dive deep into abstract concepts. This prolific use of symbolism offers researchers a rich field to dissect, interpret, and reinterpret.

Poe and Science Fiction

Often overshadowed by his gothic tales, Poe’s foray into science fiction, exemplified by stories like The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall and Mellonta Tauta , is an area ripe for exploration. Here, he blends his narrative genius with speculative visions of science, creating stories that can be viewed as precursors to the modern science fiction genre.

Poetic Techniques and Innovations

Poe was not just a storyteller; he was a poet par excellence. His poems, such as Annabel Lee , The Bells , and Ulalume , are studies in rhythm, sound, and emotion. They oscillate between the melancholic and the macabre, making them enduring pieces of poetic art. Researching his poetic techniques, innovations, and influences can be a fulfilling journey for anyone interested in poetic forms and structures.

Literary Criticism and Theories

As a critic, Poe had strong opinions on art, literature, and the role of the critic. His reviews, essays, and theories on writing are illuminating, offering a peek into the mind of a literary genius. Exploring Poe’s literary criticism can provide insights into 19th-century literary standards, Poe’s influences, and his expectations from literature and fellow writers.

Poe’s cultural impact is another intriguing facet to consider. His influence is not limited to American literature but spans globally, impacting various art forms. From cinema adaptations to his influence on subsequent writers and even musicians, Poe’s legacy is extensive and multifaceted.

The very nature of Poe’s work – its depth, diversity, and enduring relevance – makes it a goldmine for research. Whether one is analyzing the structural aspects of his poems, dissecting the themes of his tales, or tracing the influences of his personal life on his works, the opportunities for scholarly exploration are virtually limitless.

In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary contributions are not mere tales to be read and forgotten. They are intricate webs of narrative brilliance, emotional depth, and symbolic complexity. For literature students and scholars, every Poe story or poem presents a unique research challenge, beckoning them to delve deeper, question more, and embark on an endless journey of literary discovery.

How to Choose Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

Selecting a topic for a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is like being a kid in a candy store. The options are vast, intriguing, and tempting. But with so many directions to pursue, how does one choose a topic that’s not only engaging but also academically rewarding? Let’s embark on this journey of selection with some structured steps and key considerations.

• Identify Your Interest: Begin by determining which of Poe’s works or themes particularly captivate you. Is it the eerie atmosphere of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the relentless psychological torment in “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Your genuine interest will make the research process more enjoyable and your paper more passionate.
• Consider the Scope: While it’s tempting to pick a broad topic like “Poe’s contribution to American literature,” it might be too vast for a detailed study. Instead, opt for more narrow focuses, such as “Poe’s influence on the detective fiction genre.”
• Historical Context: Poe’s writings did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding the socio-political and cultural context of his time can offer a fresh lens to view his works. Topics like “Poe and the American Romantic Movement” or “Societal Reflections in Poe’s Gothic Tales” can be compelling.
• Analytical versus Argumentative: Determine the nature of your paper. An analytical paper on “The Symbolism in The Raven ” differs from an argumentative paper asserting “Poe’s Representation of Women as Symbols of Death and Decay.”
• Relevance to Modern Times: Exploring how Poe’s themes resonate with contemporary issues can be enlightening. For instance, examining the portrayal of mental health in his stories in light of current psychological understanding can be a rich research area.
• Cross-disciplinary Approaches: Don’t restrict yourself to purely literary angles. Poe’s works can be explored from psychological, sociological, or even philosophical perspectives. A topic like “Freudian Analysis of Poe’s Protagonists” can be intriguing.
• Comparative Studies: Comparing Poe with other contemporaries or authors from different eras can shed light on literary evolutions and contrasts. Topics such as “Poe and Hawthorne: A Study in Dark Romanticism” can offer dual insights.
• Unexplored Angles: While much has been written about Poe’s famous works, venturing into his lesser-known stories, poems, or essays can be rewarding. Delving deep into these uncharted territories can present fresh perspectives.
• Consider Available Resources: Ensure that there are enough primary and secondary sources available for your chosen topic. While original interpretations are valuable, building upon or contrasting with existing scholarship enriches your research.
• Seek Feedback: Before finalizing your topic, discuss it with peers, professors, or literature enthusiasts. Fresh eyes can offer new perspectives, refine your focus, or even present angles you hadn’t considered.

In conclusion, choosing a research paper topic on Edgar Allan Poe requires a blend of personal interest, academic viability, and originality. Remember that the goal is not just to explore the enigmatic world Poe created but to add a unique voice to the ongoing discourse about his works. Armed with passion and a structured approach, you’re set to select a topic that will not only enlighten readers but also deepen your appreciation of Poe’s literary genius.

How to Write an Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper

Crafting a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is a journey into the heart of 19th-century American Gothic literature. Known as the master of macabre, Poe’s works are rich in symbolism, psychological insights, and intricate narratives. To bring justice to such depth in a research paper, a systematic approach is necessary. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the hauntingly beautiful world of Poe and create a compelling paper.

• Deep Reading: Before everything else, immerse yourself in the selected work(s) of Poe. Read it multiple times, noting the nuances, literary techniques, and recurrent themes. This isn’t just casual reading; it’s about diving deep into the text.
• Thesis Statement: A research paper isn’t merely a summary. It needs a central argument or perspective. Craft a clear, concise thesis statement that conveys the essence of your paper. For instance, “Through The Fall of the House of Usher , Poe explores the thin boundary between sanity and madness.”
• Outline Your Thoughts: Structure is vital when delving into Poe’s intricate narratives. Create an outline with clear sections, including introduction, literature review, methodology (if applicable), main arguments, counterarguments, and conclusion.
• Historical and Biographical Context: To understand Poe, it’s imperative to understand his life and times. Infuse your paper with insights about Poe’s tumultuous life, his contemporaries, and the broader socio-cultural milieu of his era.
• Literary Analysis: Delve into the literary aspects of the work. Explore Poe’s use of symbolism, metaphor, allegory, and other devices. Analyze his narrative structures, use of unreliable narrators, or the rhythm and meter in his poems.
• Interdisciplinary Insights: Don’t limit your analysis to a purely literary perspective. Draw insights from psychology (especially when discussing tales like The Tell-Tale Heart ), philosophy, or even the sciences.
• Engage with Scholars: Your interpretations should be in dialogue with established Poe scholars. Reference critical essays, research papers, and academic discourses that align or contradict your arguments. This lends credibility to your work.
• Address Counterarguments: A well-rounded research paper acknowledges differing views. If there are prominent interpretations that contradict your thesis, address them. It shows academic integrity and a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
• Effective Conclusion: Wrap up by reiterating your thesis and summarizing your main arguments. Also, hint at the broader implications of your findings or suggest areas for future research.
• Proofreading and Citations: After pouring so much effort into your analysis, don’t let grammatical errors or incorrect citations mar your paper. Review your work multiple times, use citation tools, and adhere to the desired formatting style (MLA, APA, etc.).

In summary, writing a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is an intricate dance between analysis and appreciation. While the process requires a meticulous approach, it’s also an opportunity to immerse oneself in the rich tapestry of Poe’s imagination. Remember, it’s not just about producing an academic paper, but also about connecting with one of the literary world’s most enigmatic figures. Embrace the challenge, and let Poe’s haunting allure guide your pen.

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By choosing iResearchNet, you’re not just selecting a service; you’re opting for a partnership. A partnership that understands the nuances of Poe’s writings, recognizes the depths of his narratives, and captures the essence of his stories in every line written. Each tale, from the heart-wrenching Annabel Lee to the haunting Masque of the Red Death , demands more than just a surface-level reading. It calls for a deep dive into the very soul of the narrative, a task that our expert writers are perfectly poised to undertake.

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94 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on edgar allan poe, ✍️ edgar allan poe essay topics for college, 👍 good edgar allan poe research topics & essay examples, 💡 simple edgar allan poe essay ideas, ❓ edgar allan poe research questions.

• Symbols in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe Through a Psychological Lens
• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis
• Writing Style of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Symbol of the Cat in the Story “Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Poem Analysis: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe: A Short Story Analysis
• Literary Devices in The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe This paper analyzes the poem by Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” and pays specific attention to repetition as well as syntactic and morphological features.
• Literary Elements in “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is one of the more famous works of the author. It tells the story of a grotesque plague that is sweeping the land.
• Death Within Edgar Allan Poe’s Works Edgar Allan Poe was one of the authors who turned to the notion of death in his works: the most emotively it is expressed in Poe’s poems “The Raven”, “Lenore”, and “Annabel Lee”.
• The Cask of Amontillado Summary and Analysis In the current paper, the setting, characterization, narration, and plot of The Cask of Amontillado are analyzed to understand true intentions of the author.
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Alan Poe The analysis includes the background of the author and the short story, as well as the detailed examination of the nature of the society Poe’s characters, and the author himself.
• Deceit in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe is an example of a strait plot based on revenge. It touches upon different aspects of life: friendship, trust, deceit, and envy.
• Evil and Vengeance in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most astonishing short stories that has been interpreted in numerous ways.
• Love and Loss in Poem “Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe The poem celebrates the invincible love between the lyrical hero and his little childhood friend. The main idea of the poem is that love is stronger than death.
• Literary Analysis: “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Elements of jealousy are evident in the poem. Overcoming this jealousy, even after Annabelle’s death, allowed the speaker to stay in touch with his significant other.
• Imagery in “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe This paper argues that the imagery of Annabel Lee describes the eternity of love and its independence from death and higher powers.
• “The Cask of Amontillado” Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is a mystical story about a cold-blooded murder that raises numerous questions for every reader.
• The Detective and the Criminal: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe The depiction of the detective and the criminal in the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” presents readers with a number of concepts both well-known and unique to the genre.
• Transformation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style The paper states that Allan Poe’s life and writings reflect hope despite painful hardships. The characters were representative of lower-class citizens.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe This paper will focus on the comparison of styles and themes in two of Poe’s short stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”.
• Contrasts and Details of “The Cask of Amontillado“ by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was first published in 1846, and it is widely recognized today as the best or one of the best short stories written by the author.
• Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Stories The works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe are separated by nearly half a century, but they are united by the genre.
• Strong Moral Principles in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is written too immorally, with cruelty to animals and people, and there are many similar examples in the world.
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Review The raven stands for the narrator’s inner self, who is trying to come to terms with the loss he has to endure. The man lost the woman he loved, Leonore.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Works and Their Characteristics Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest American writers. Numerous poems and short stories are still being studied, and new facets and hidden meanings are being discovered.
• The Tell-Tale Heart Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. While reading it, I did not see any signs of difficult language or complex structure.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Analysis Edgar Allan Poe represented American romanticism, the forerunner of symbolism and decadence. The paper analyzes several short stories and poems written by Edgar Allan Poe.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s scary stories. The story is told on behalf of an unnamed narrator who killed an older man with whom he lived under the same roof.
• “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Poe’s story is a monologue of a man who decided to kill his old neighbor. The narrative begins in medias res, and the reader cannot know for sure anything about the characters.
• Analysis of Stories: The Gold-bug and Other by Edgar Allan Poe and In Our Time by Ernst Hemingway This paper aims to discuss how the two famous authors namely Edgar Allan Poe and Ernst Hemingway tries to use the concept of foreign and foreigner in their short stories.
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Concept of Punishment The concepts of punishment and alienation are familiar to the author and can be easily traced in Poe’s two works: “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
• Mental Health in “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper highlight how schizophrenia can arrive unnoticed in both men and women and only result in an episode after it is too late.
• “The Mask of the Red Death”: Story by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe published several stories with gothic inspiration, but none more critically acclaimed than “The Mask of the Red Death.”
• The Short Story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe In Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, universal and specific symbols prove the uniqueness of his writing style.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado In The Cask of Amontillado, Po pursues the goal of analyzing the character’s motives but does not provide the necessary information.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” The paper discusses one macabre story, saturated with Gothic atmosphere, madness, and decay. The name of this story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.
• The Short Story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe: Reliability of the Narrator After finishing the story by Edgar Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the reader may be left wondering about the validity of the events that took place during the narration.
• Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat Comparison This research paper explores the lives and artistic works of two outstanding creators – Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
• “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe The story Red Death was written by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is about Fight of prince Prospero against red death, the plague which affected the country.
• Edgar Alan Poe’s Stories Analysis The short stories written by Edgar Alan Poe contain masterfully indented elements of suspense using Gothicism in depicting death, mental madness, and supernatural elements.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights” The paper discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights”. The narrator wanted to take revenge with impunity, also making sure that it would be recognized as revenge.
• Alcoholism and Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Many arguments support alcoholism as the cause of Poe’s death, including his friends’ testimonials, newspapers’ reports about brain congestion, and social observations.
• The Biography Narrative About Edgar Allan Poe The paper contains three of Edgar Allan Poe’s life episodes, which reveal the personality and creativity of the writer and may be informative about the Civil War and the Wild West.
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the storyteller visits a mansion, which belongs to his sick friend, Roderick Usher.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Dark Tale: The Cask of Amontillado Explored The article is an overview of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: the author summarizes the essence, telling what the intrigue is.
• Works by Edgar Poe as Examples of Good Essay Creating an outstanding piece of writing is highly dependent on Poe’ three main arguments: length, methodology, and writing.
• The Use of Eerie and Bizarre of Edgar Alan Poe This article is an analysis of what tools the creepy and bizarre Edgar Alan Poe uses to develop the effect of horror in his works.
• “Cask of the Amontillado” a Story by Edgar Allan Poe In his short story The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Poe uses foreshadowing and irony techniques in order to create a sense of suspense that engages the readers.
• Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King: A Comparison and Contrast of Their Writing Careers
• The Road Not Taken by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Frost
• Edgar Allan Poe, the Personification of Death and a True American Genius
• Overview of Gothic Literature and the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• The Setting and the Narrative Style in Four Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Beliefs About the Afterlife
• The Childhood, Achievements, and Literary Works of Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Literary Portrayals of Fear and Madness
• Analysis of the Symbolism Used in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
• Edgar Allan Poe and the American Romantic Revolution
• How Edgar Allan Poe’s Work Is Affected by His Predecessors?
• Edgar Allan Poe Virtually Created Detective Story and Perfected the Psychological Thriller
• Symbolic Motifs and Gothic Imagery of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Obsessed Characters of the Narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
• The Mourning for Lost Love in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Concentrated Emotional Effects
• The Literary Elements Used by Edgar Allan Poe in the Story “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Life and the Effects It Had on His Writing
• Revenge, Betrayal, and Premature Burial in Edgar Allan Poe’s Novel “The Cask of Amontillado”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Key Influence on the Zombie Fiction
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence Literature?
• Does Imagination Overcome Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Keep the Reader in Suspense?
• What Influenced Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Dreams to Portray Terror and Mirror the Narrator’s Sense of Reality?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe So Great?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Create Horror in “The Pit and the Pendulum”?
• Does Edgar Allan Poe Favor Death and Terror Over Other Literary Genres?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Unique?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Define American Literature?
• What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings About?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Explore Similarities Between Love and Hate in His Work?
• What Is the Most Interesting Fact or Facts About the Life of Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Do Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings Illuminate His Upbringing?
• What Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Greatest Influences?
• How Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Influenced by His Life?
• What Are the Four Major Themes of Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Has Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Influenced Today’s Culture?
• What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Two Main Rules of Writing?
• Did Edgar Allan Poe Contribute to the Development of a New Literary Genre?
• How Is Edgar Allan Poe Remembered Today?
• What Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Important Legacy?
• Do the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe Reflect the Characteristics of Gothic Literature?
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence America?
• Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Such Dark Stories?

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StudyCorgi . "94 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics." December 21, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/edgar-allan-poe-essay-topics/.

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These essay examples and topics on Edgar Allan Poe were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 8, 2024 .

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100 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in American literature. Known for his dark and mysterious themes, Poe's work continues to captivate readers and inspire new generations of writers. If you're a student tasked with writing an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, you may be struggling to come up with a compelling topic. To help you get started, here are 100 Edgar Allan Poe essay topic ideas and examples:

• Analyze the use of symbolism in Poe's "The Raven."
• Discuss the theme of madness in Poe's short stories.
• Explore the role of women in Poe's works.
• Compare and contrast the different narrators in Poe's stories.
• Investigate the influence of Poe's personal life on his writing.
• Examine the use of Gothic elements in Poe's poems.
• Discuss the significance of death in Poe's poetry.
• Analyze the theme of isolation in Poe's works.
• Explore the role of the supernatural in Poe's stories.
• Compare Poe's poetry to his short stories.
• Investigate the use of irony in Poe's writing.
• Discuss the theme of revenge in Poe's works.
• Analyze the role of fear in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of love and loss in Poe's poetry.
• Discuss the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on modern horror literature.
• Analyze the use of setting in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of guilt in Poe's works.
• Discuss the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Analyze the use of suspense in Poe's writing.
• Explore the theme of obsession in Poe's works.
• Discuss the role of the narrator in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of duality in Poe's works.
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Black Cat."
• Discuss the use of unreliable narrators in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of addiction in Poe's works.
• Explore the role of death in Poe's poetry.
• Discuss the theme of betrayal in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the use of repetition in Poe's writing.
• Explore the theme of imprisonment in Poe's works.
• Discuss the significance of the title character in "Ligeia."
• Analyze the use of foreshadowing in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of redemption in Poe's works.
• Discuss the role of the supernatural in Poe's poetry.
• Analyze the theme of decay in Poe's works.
• Explore the significance of the title character in "Lenore."
• Discuss the use of unreliable memory in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of madness in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Explore the role of guilt in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Analyze the theme of obsession in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Explore the role of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
• Discuss the use of irony in "The Masque of the Red Death."
• Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Black Cat."
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Raven."
• Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
• Analyze the theme of duality in "William Wilson."
• Explore the role of fear in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
• Analyze the theme of isolation in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Explore the role of the supernatural in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the use of unreliable narration in "The Black Cat."
• Analyze the theme of love and loss in "Annabel Lee."
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the role of the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Analyze the theme of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
• Explore the use of repetition in "The Raven."
• Analyze the theme of madness in "The Black Cat."
• Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Masque of the Red Death."
• Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
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Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation

Kelly Ross, Rider University

Journal Details

Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation  invites submission of original articles and notes, welcomes work grounded in a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives, and encourages inquiries proposing submissions and projects. The editors of  Poe Studies  do not review essays that are simultaneously under consideration elsewhere.

Electronic submissions are preferred; send in Microsoft Word format by email attachment. To aid blind review, the author's name should not appear on the essay itself. Contributions should conform to  The Chicago Manual of Style , 16th edition. Submissions that find their way into the journal's pages typically range from 6,000 to 13,000 words—depending on the requirements of the argument in question. (Unrevised dissertation chapters are not likely to meet with success.)

Time of report is normally two to four months. Email submissions and inquiries to [email protected] .  PS Style Sheet for Articles

PS Style Sheet for Reviews and Marginalia

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation  invites submission of original articles and notes, welcomes work grounded in a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives, and encourages inquiries proposing submissions and projects. The editors do not review essays that are simultaneously under consideration elsewhere. Book reviews are usually solicited and vetted in-house by editors.

The journal conducts a double-anonymous review process: 1) submissions are initially evaluated in-house by the editors for general suitability and returned to authors or advanced; 2) those that are advanced go to two outside specialist readers, and any invited revisions are typically evaluated again by those readers. Submissions that find their way into the journal's pages make clearly new and persuasively argued contributions that reflect a thorough knowledge of the state of the field, and they typically range from 6,000 to 13,000 words—depending on the requirements of the argument in question. (Unrevised dissertation chapters are not likely to meet with success.) Time of report is normally two to four months. Time from acceptance to publication is 6 months to 2 years.

Kelly Ross,  Rider University

Consulting Editors

Jana Argersinger,  Washington State University         Alexander Hammond,  Washington State University         Scott Peeples,  College of Charleston

Translation Editor 

Emron Esplin, Brigham Young University

Advisory Board

Adam Bradford (2019-)  Amy Branam Armiento (2024-)  Caleb Doan (2023-)   Micah Donohue (2022-)    Lesley Ginsberg (2024-)     Karen Grumberg (2021-)    Travis Montgomery (2019-)    Elizabeth Sweeney (2022-)   Sandra Tomc (2019-)   John Tresch (2019-)   Margarida Vale de Gato (2019-)   Jeffrey Weinstock (2021-)

Newly Translated Poe Scholarship

Poe is a mainstay in literary traditions and popular culture around the world. Both major and minor studies have been written on Poe in numerous languages, but much of this scholarship is only available in the source texts.

“Newly Translated Poe Scholarship” is a running feature in  Poe Studies  (starting with the 2020 volume of the journal) that offers English translations of previously untranslated scholarship on Poe.

Proposals for possible scholarship to be translated for “Newly Translated Poe Scholarship” should be sent directly to the journal’s translation editor, Emron Esplin, at  [email protected] , and they should include the following:

• The name of the author and the title of the piece being proposed for translation
• The word count of the piece in its source language
• A 250- to 500-word description of the scholar, the piece, and their significance in establishing, altering, or questioning Poe’s position, influence, or importance in that particular scholarly tradition
• A sentence that affirms that the piece has not previously been published in English translation
• The translator can be the same person who writes the proposal
• If the writer of the proposal is not the translator, the proposal creator will need to demonstrate that he/she has been in contact with the proposed translator
• A brief discussion of whether or not the proposed piece of scholarship is in the public domain or whether the proposal writer plans to seek permission from the copyright holders to publish the translation

Review copies should be sent to:

Book reviews are usually solicited, but proposals for reviews may be sent to  [email protected] .

Publishers may send gratis copies to

Kelly Ross 332 Fine Arts, English Department Rider University 2083 Lawrenceville Road Lawrenceville, NJ 08648

Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Current Contents
• Web of Science
• Current Abstracts, 6/1/2008-
• Humanities International Complete, 6/1/2008-
• Humanities International Index, 6/1/2008-
• Humanities Source, 6/1/2008-
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 6/1/2008-
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 6/1/2008-
• Scopus, 2013-
• ArticleFirst, vol.25, no.1/2, 1992-vol.36, 2003
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.41, no.1, 2008-vol.43, no.1, 2010
• Personal Alert (E-mail)
• The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Abstracts of English Studies   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Bibliographic Index   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities   (Ceased)  (Print)
• MLA Abstracts of Articles in Scholarly Journals   (Ceased)  (Print)

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0 (2022) 0 (Five-Year Impact Factor) 0.00021 (Eigenfactor™ Score) Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor): Note:  While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.  

© Clarivate Analytics 2023

Published annually

Readers include: Poe scholars

Print circulation: 38

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October Issue – August 15

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Online advertising reservations are placed on a month-to-month basis.

All online ads are due on the 20th of the month prior to the reservation.

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For more information on advertising or to place an ad, please visit the Advertising page.  

eTOC (Electronic Table of Contents) alerts can be delivered to your inbox when this or any Hopkins Press journal is published via your ProjectMUSE MyMUSE account. Visit the eTOC instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up your MyMUSE account and alerts.  

Also of Interest

Meghan O’Rourke

Greg Zacharias, Creighton University

Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Katherine Malone, South Dakota State University

Maria Farland, Fordham University and Duncan Faherty, Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center

Anjali Nerlekar, Rutgers University, and Stephen Ross, Concordia University

Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia

Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College

Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State University

Ryan Cull, New Mexico State University

Cheryl Lester, University of Kansas  Julie Beth Napolin, The New School  Rebecca Nisetich, University of Southern Maine

Brian Yothers, Saint Louis University

Patti Duncan, Oregon State University

Adam Ross, The University of the South

Andrew Osborn, University of Dallas

Dora Malech, Johns Hopkins University

Dominic Rainsford, Aarhus University, Denmark

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34 Poe and His Global Advocates

Department of English, Bringham Young University

• Published: 05 April 2018
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This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

To claim that no other US writer has had as much influence on world literature as Edgar Allan Poe is not to practice hyperbole. To stake this claim in the active voice that it deserves: Poe is the most influential US writer in the world. The United States has certainly produced other writers whose works have influenced literature on a global scale, but we (as scholars, readers, consumers) would be hard-pressed to find another US author whose global presence is as broad and whose international impact resonates as deeply as Poe’s. Poe is ubiquitous. His works and his image manifest themselves in highbrow (literature, critical theory, art, classical music, and cinema), popular (B movies, T-shirts, comic books, various genres of popular music, and all sorts of kitsch), and social media cultures (YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter accounts, and countless memes) across the world. Most Poe audiences—regardless of the language(s) in which they access Poe—come to Poe in more than one way, and these varied avenues to Poe speak to the lasting power of his works themselves and to the rejuvenating power of what translation studies scholar André Lefevere calls “refractions,” “rewrites,” or “rewritings” of literary works. Lefevere argues that translators, literary critics, creators of anthologies, and literary historians are all rewriters of texts and that their works or rewritings wield significant power that keeps “original” works or source texts and their authors alive in the literary marketplace and in our literary canons. 1 Linking this type of rewriting with the creative responses to Poe that poets and fiction writers have created since Poe’s death in 1849 reveals the almost incalculable strands of influence Poe’s works and his persona have generated.

Although the scope of this essay does not allow me to prove quantitatively my claim about Poe’s global impact with raw data, a brief list of the distinct threads of Poe’s influence on world literature and culture, along with my analysis, substantiate my declaration. Poe’s invention of the detective genre, alone, puts him on a short list of globally influential US writers. The influence of Poe’s Dupin tales and other stories of ratiocination, the weight of his tales of terror, the power of his pre-Freudian explorations of the human psyche, the resonance (both formal and narrative) of his melancholy poetry, the timeliness of his attempts at early science fiction, and the longevity of his theory of effect on the way we think about short fiction all combine to make a clear case for Poe’s position as the most influential US writer. 2 In short, Poe came fairly early in the US literary tradition, he wrote in more genres than many influential US writers, and, importantly, his disparate works have led to his being championed by some of the most significant writers in various global literary traditions from the middle of the nineteenth century until now.

My argument rests on this last point—on the championing of Poe and the advocacy for his literature that numerous writers who are considered important, or even essential, to their own literary traditions have adopted from the late 1840s onward. Poe influenced these writers, but they also influenced him (or, stated more directly, they influenced his reputation and his overall image) by giving his work and his life special attention in their own literary corpora. 3 These literary stars act as advocates who “plead for,” “speak on behalf of,” “support, recommend, [and] speak favorably of” Poe. 4 Their advocacy continually refreshes and maintains Poe’s image while spreading Poe’s work across divides of both time and space.

Considering the reciprocal relationship between Poe and his global advocates allows us to reread the opening paragraph of Rufus Griwold’s now infamous obituary for Poe as ironic or unintentional foreshadowing:

EDGAR ALLAN POE is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was well known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars. 5

Several positive obituaries and rebuttals to Griswold’s caustic commentary demonstrate that Poe did, in fact, have plenty of friends when he died in 1849. 6 However, Griswold’s nod to Poe’s growing reputation outside of the United States unwittingly points toward the friendships that would later salvage Poe’s reputation from Griswold’s character assassination. These “foreign” friends or advocates treated Poe’s work with a seriousness and his image with a reverence that, in the former case, would not be seen in his own country until at least the modernist period and, in the latter case, might never be equaled on Poe’s home turf. Many of them were vivid literary stars who brought a stability to Poe’s reputation, raising it to the astral level regardless of Griswold’s attempt to diminish Poe’s brilliance by qualifying it as erratic.

In the following pages, I offer both a sweeping and a specific analysis of Poe and his global advocates. In the first section, I examine in broad terms, beginning with France and then glossing East Asia and Latin America, how Poe’s writings and his persona resonated with key literary figures from disparate nations throughout the globe, how these writers became strong advocates for Poe, and how their advocacy made Poe a central figure in many of their specific literary traditions and a cardinal presence on the global literary map. For most of this section, I approach authors from literary and linguistic traditions outside of my own training and expertise, and although I cite some of the primary texts in their source languages, most of the scholarship with which I engage in this section is in English. This section hints at the extensive reach of both Poe’s global influence and the world’s influence on Poe, inherently reveals the linguistic limits of any single-authored project on Poe’s global presence, and demonstrates that the significance of the relationships between Poe and these particular writers has reached a level in which entire bodies of literary criticism in the source languages and in English are dedicated to their analysis. I then offer a case study of three particular writers who were Poe advocates in the Río de la Plata region of South America, a literary and linguistic tradition I know well, as a detailed example of Poe’s reciprocal influence and the positive power of his advocates. I conclude by examining the ancient concept of astral influence, describing these advocates as literary stars, and arguing that, in both the broad and the specific cases, Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the advocacy as on the brilliance of his original works.

Global Advocates from France and Beyond

Poe’s global advocates have received increased attention in the English-language academy since the middle of the twentieth century. While T. S. Eliot wondered aloud about what the French saw in Poe in a Library of Congress lecture in 1948 and walked away seeing Poe with new eyes, 7 other scholars have produced several important treatises on Poe and France over the last century, including Célestin Pierre Cambiaire’s 1927   The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (which predates Eliot’s musings), Patrick F. Quinn’s 1957   The French Face of Edgar Poe , and many works by Lois Davis Vines. 8 Poe’s relationship with both Spanish American letters and peninsular Spanish literature has received serious treatment since 1934, when John Eugene Englekirk published what was, at the time, an exhaustive book on Poe and his Spanish-speaking advocates on both sides of the Atlantic— Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature . 9 In more recent decades, several edited collections have reiterated the importance of the French and Spanish/Spanish American Poe connections while casting broader nets that demonstrate Poe’s resounding influence and its reciprocal responses across Asia, the Americas, Europe, northern Africa, and various islands throughout the world’s oceans: Benjamin Franklin Fisher’s 1986   Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities ; Lois Davis Vines’s 1999   Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities ; Barbara Cantalupo’s 2012   Poe’s Pervasive Influence ; and my and Margarida Vale de Gato’s 2014   Translated Poe all expose and examine Poe’s impact on disparate world sites and literary traditions and the enormity and intensity of the efforts of his global advocates. 10

French poet Charles Baudelaire serves as the archetypal Poe advocate. Although not Poe’s first foreign reader or his first French translator, Baudelaire took to Poe with an alacrity rarely seen in a relationship between two literary giants. Their literary affinity became the relationship that delivered Poe to a truly global audience, and it still serves as the most powerful example of a major literary figure in his own right dedicating a significant amount of time, effort, and love to the spreading of Poe’s work and the cultivation of his image. Literary advocacy can take many forms, and in the case between Baudelaire and Poe, we could describe Baudelaire as a disciple, a translator, and a biographer/literary critic of Poe—all particular parts that other Poe advocates tend to play as well, although not every advocate adopts all three roles.

Baudelaire’s Poe discipleship might best be captured in the oft-quoted passage from Mon cœur mis à nu [ My Heart Laid Bare ] in which he resolved: “Faire tous les matins ma prière à Dieu, réservoir de toute force et de toute justice, à mon père, à Mariette et à Poe , comme intercesseurs;” [“To pray every morning to God, the source of all power and all justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe , as intercessors.”] 11 This resolution, made during Baudelaire’s final years of life, demonstrates both his intimate relationship with Poe (as he places the dead author on the same level as his own dead father and his family’s deceased servant who had cared for him in his youth) and his elevation of Poe to the very position which Baudelaire himself had spent his adult life fulfilling for Poe—the role of the advocate. The Oxford English Dictionary ’s first and oldest definition of the noun “advocate” describes the word in clearly religious terms as follows: “1. Christian Church . A person or agent believed to intercede between God and sinners; spec. Christ or the Virgin Mary.” 12 While Baudelaire places Poe in the position of a spiritual advocate as an intermediary between himself and God, Baudelaire had already placed himself as a literary advocate, first between Poe and France and then between Poe and the world, for almost two decades according to the OED ’s more common definition of the term: “Advocate: 4. gen . a. A person who pleads for or speaks on behalf of another; a person who supports, recommends, or speaks favorably of another.” 13

Baudelaire’s advocacy for Poe is most visible through his massive translation project of Poe’s prose and his treatment of Poe’s persona in his biographical sketches of the US writer. As Vines notes, “[b]etween 1848 and his premature death in 1867, Baudelaire published translations of forty-four of Poe’s tales, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka , and other prose pieces while continuing to write” his own works. 14 He also wrote a lengthy biographical piece on Poe that opened his famous 1856 collection of Poe translations, Histoires extraordinaires . 15 In all, the French poet “devoted” a total of “1,063 pages [ . . . ] to Poe.” 16 In short, Baudelaire maintained a career within a career as a Poe advocate, and the global impact of his Poe advocacy is incalculable. The various essays in Poe Abroad and Translated Poe reiterate how Baudelaire, his translations, and/or his writings on Poe’s biography served as founding elements of Poe’s rising reputation across Europe (especially in Portugal, Spain, and Romania) and the Americas (from Mexico to Argentina, from Nicaragua to Brazil, and most literary traditions in-between). Each of these literary polysystems embraced Poe, but by comparing story titles, which stories appear (and often in which order), and basic details from Poe biographies available in these places in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we know that this Poe is primarily Baudelaire’s Poe. As Poe’s primary advocate, he also served as a filter that influenced which type of Poe these traditions initially received and which type of Poe they originally revered. Even in the twenty-first century, Baudelaire’s proclivity for the darker, guilt-ridden, or mysterious Poe tales that he published in Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires still reveals itself through the way contemporary readers and scholars view Poe in these traditions.

Staying closer to Baudelaire’s home, his work with Poe also brought about profound effects on several French writers who wrote in his wake—especially Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. Mallarmé continued the Poe translation project where Baudelaire had left off and translated a small number of Poe’s poems into verse and a large number into prose. 17 In another move of discipleship, he purportedly moved to London with the expressed purpose of improving his English so that he could better understand Poe’s works. 18 Mallarmé’s own poem, “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” advocates for Poe by chastising Poe’s “blasphemous” detractors in his and Mallarmé’s own century and by marking eternity as Poe’s territory. 19 Valéry, in contrast, was more interested in Poe as thinker and gravitated toward pieces such as “The Philosophy of Composition,” the Dupin tales, and Eureka . His own Monsieur Teste develops a character who can be read as an extension or exaggeration of Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or as an attempt at capturing self-consciousness. 20 By approaching Poe’s thoughts on thought rigorously, Valéry acts as a different kind of Poe advocate who assigns a seriousness to Poe that, as we have already seen with Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” affects Poe’s reputation and his standing back in his own country.

In short, France was and is a special place for Poe advocacy, and this first wave, or set of three waves, of French advocacy for Poe functions as a clear example of how translation studies theorist Itamar Even-Zohar describes the integration of “translated literature” into a “central position” in a particular “literary polysystem.” 21 Even-Zohar argues that

to say that translated literature maintains a central position in the literary polysystem means that it participates actively in shaping the center of the polysystem. In such a situation it is by and large an integral part of innovatory forces, and as such likely to be identified with major events in literary history while these are taking place. This implies that in this situation no clear-cut distinction is maintained between “original” and “translated” writings, and that often it is the leading writers (or members of the avant-garde who are about to become leading writers) who produce the most conspicuous or appreciated translations. 22

The overwhelming success of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe inserted Poe firmly into the French literary tradition, making Poe (not just Baudelaire) influential on Mallarmé, Valéry, and the French Symbolists. These latter writers’ work as Poe translators, as poets, and as thinkers further wrote Poe into the French literary polysystem, where his writings and persona continue to influence new generations of French writers. We cannot, however, separate this Poe influence from these “leading writers” who did happen to be “members of the avant-garde who . . . bec[a]me leading writers.” 23 In other words, Poe–Baudelaire–Mallarmé–Valéry are so entangled that it can be difficult to distinguish between Poe’s influence per se on French literature and art versus Poe’s influence via his three most famous French advocates. One thing, however, remains certain: without the advocacy there would be no French Poe. A Poe in France would certainly exist, but Poe’s position as a writer central to the French literary tradition relies on the pointed and painstaking advocacy of these three writers who, themselves, form essential parts of the French canon. 24

The early start date, deep national impact, and widespread global influence of Poe’s relationship with his French advocates make this particular example of Poe advocacy remarkable, but Poe’s good fortune with significant writers on the global scene is not singular to France. Essential writers in several disparate literary traditions discovered (some through the French and some on their own), enjoyed, and advocated for Poe. In some cases, these advocates played more than one part—translator, biographer, literary critic, anthologizer, poet, fiction writer—in their advocacy for Poe, whereas in other circumstances individual advocates adopted single roles. Poe Abroad and Translated Poe demonstrate time after time how Poe influenced important literary figures and how these writers then became Poe advocates in numerous ways and at various levels of intensity.

In the rest of Europe and in Russia, important national writers continually advocated for Poe. Elvira Osipova describes Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s publication of Dmitry Mikhailovsky’s Russian translations of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” in the former’s magazine Vremya as an important “turning point” in Poe’s well-documented Russian reception, 25 and both Osipova and Eloise M. Boyle examine the reciprocal relationship between Poe and the Russian Symbolist poets Konstantin Bal’mont and Valery Brjusov. 26 Liviu Cotrău calls two of Poe’s early translators in Romania—Mihai Eminescu and Ion Luca Caragiale—“Romania’s best poet and best playwright, respectively” and demonstrates how these authors both translated Poe via Baudelaire. 27 This early interest by important Romanian authors in a French Poe cast the US writer as a significant figure and led to an extensive tradition of Poe translation and retranslation in Romania that has flourished throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 28 Margarida Vale de Gato examines how Fernando Pessoa, “the leading figure of Portuguese modernism,” continually returned to Poe “in his prolific unpublished papers” and published three of his translations of Poe’s poems. 29 And this list could continue. Whether early in Poe’s global reception (e.g., Baudelaire), much later in that reception (e.g., the postmodern German writer Arno Schmidt), or somewhere in between (e.g., late nineteenth-century Swedish writers Ola Hansson and August Strindberg), many European writers who were key movers in their own national literary traditions “supported” and “spoke for” Poe by translating, responding to, and/or rewriting his works.

Poe’s influence in East Asia began later than his influence in Europe, and although that influence might seem less reciprocal than the Poe–Europe relationship (with the influence running from Poe to the local writer rather than from the East Asian writer back to Poe’s reputation), Japan stands out as one site of two-way influence and powerful Poe advocacy. 30 Takayuki Tatsumi demonstrates Poe’s lasting influence in Japan from the Meiji period (1868–1912) through the contemporary Heisei period, noting that Poe was particularly influential during the twentieth century and that Japanese artists of that century actively responded to Poe rather than passively receiving his influence: “from the Taisho period (1912–1926) through the Showa period (1926–1989), Poe was deeply imbibed, further developed, and creatively rewritten by a number of talented Japanese writers.” 31 Along this path, Poe was privileged enough to be translated or adapted by “the distinguished novelist Aeba Kōson” and “noted journalist” Morita Shiken during the earlier Meiji period as a part of Japan’s major shift from archaic, formal written expression to modern, conversational writing; 32 to be translated by Sato Haruo and Tanizaki Jun’Ichiro and rewritten by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke—all “major Romantic and even decadent writers of the Taisho period” 33 —and to be taken up by the popular detective writer Edogawa Rampo of the Showa period, who “established the Japanese literary subgenre of detective fiction” and whose penname references Poe. 34 Tatsumi clearly demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between Poe and Rampo in specific terms that we can apply to the Poe–Japan relationship more generally: “While it is true that Poe’s arabesque, grotesque, and ratiocinative tales exerted great influence upon Rampo’s Ero-Gro-Nonsense detective fiction, it is also true that Rampo’s powerful and creative misreadings of his precursor compel us today to reread the earlier tradition through the prism of his modern re-creations.” 35 Poe has influenced several of Japan’s important writers, these writers have advocated for his work (particularly his fiction), and their own work now influences how the contemporary Japanese audience reads Poe.

Significant writers from various nations in Latin America have also adopted Poe into their literary systems and served as his faithful advocates. At several moments over the last one hundred and forty years or so, the literary relationships between specific Latin American writers and Poe have been nearly as productive as the reciprocal or symbiotic relationship between Poe and Baudelaire. Not surprisingly, some of the earliest relationships between Poe and his Latin American advocates were also mediated by Baudelaire, but scholars have demonstrated that Poe’s long-term connections with the Spanish American literary tradition rely on a three-headed source of Poe in English, French, and Spanish and that his relationship with Brazilian letters includes English-, French-, and Portuguese-language texts. 36 Poe’s presence in Brazil, as Carlos Daghlian argues, “developed independently from the American author’s renown in the Spanish-language countries of the continent[,]” and it began with the “good fortune of being discovered by Brazil’s most outstanding writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.” 37 Machado translated Poe’s “The Raven” in 1883, and both the bird and its author have been significant figures in Brazilian literature ever since. While Machado introduced Brazil to Poe, many other Brazilian writers and translators have advocated for Poe either in their own works or as Poe translators, and at times their “supplications” have taken new and interesting routes. For example, the acclaimed postmodern novelist Clarice Lispector translated eighteen of Poe’s tales for a collection aimed specifically at teenage readers. 38 Although Lispector’s own novels are known for their narrative complexity, Lenita Esteves demonstrates how Lispector’s translations of Poe’s stories partially “abridge” Poe’s texts while both “simplif[ying]” Poe’s language and shifting it to “a more colloquial register,” 39 serving as a powerful and peculiar example of how one of Poe’s advocates speaks both “favourably” and “on behalf of” him to a very specific audience: Brazilian teens. This audience, it appears, has openly received Lispector’s message about Poe since her translated collection was in its twenty-second edition in 2014. 40

Spanish America’s advocacy for Poe has been even more tireless than Brazil’s, with key figures from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century praising, responding to, and interacting with Poe. Adaptations/translations of three of Poe’s tales were circulating in Peru as early as the late 1840s, and Poe’s works were being translated in various Spanish American locales during the 1860s and 1870s. 41 However, Poe truly entered Spanish American letters with force in the late 1880s and early 1890s as a part of the modernista movement headed by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío. The Venezuelan poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde had translated Poe’s “The Raven” in 1887, 42 just a year before Darío’s collection Azul openly launched Spanish American modernismo and six years before Darío consecrated Poe as one of the “special” or “rare ones” in his 1893 text “Los raros.” 43 Pérez Bonalde’s translation was not the first in the Spanish language, but its rigor and its timing made it an extremely effective tool for promoting Poe across the Spanish-speaking world, and it remains the Spanish-language version of Poe’s most famous poem, even though other Spanish-language translations of “The Raven” that follow in its wake do a better job of re-creating Poe’s odd rhyme and meter. 44 Pérez Bonalde’s translation, coupled with Darío’s Baudelaire-influenced praise for Poe as the ultimate artist for art’s sake—“un sublime apasionado, un nervioso, uno de esos divinos semilocos necesarios para el progreso humano, lamentables cristos del arte, que por amor al eterno ideal tienen su calle de la amargura, sus espinas y su cruz” [“a passionate sublime being, a nervous man, one of those divine partially madmen necessary for human progress, lamentable Christs of art who for the love of an eternal ideal have their via dolorosa , their thorns, and their cross”] 45 —cast Poe as one of modernismo ’s primary icons and fountains of influence. This particular Poe, Englekirk argues, “was to fertilize the intellect and imagination of Central and South America more than any other American author,” and as he avers, “almost all of the followers of Modernism were directly or indirectly influenced by Poe.” 46 This influence spans the American continent from Mexico to Central America and from the equatorial nations of Colombia and Venezuela down to the southern cone. Several Poe pieces appeared in periodicals in Spanish America before the modernistas , and his presence significantly increased via the translation work of his French advocates, but the advocacy of Pérez Bonalde and Darío—the former as translator and the latter as image-curator—fused Poe and Spanish American modernismo in a way that was beneficial to both parties while permanently inscribing both the movement itself and its foreign poet-prophet into Spanish American literary history.

The reciprocal relationship of influence and advocacy between Poe and his Spanish American advocates remained strong through the twentieth century and continues today. Poe was a significant influence on the writers of the so-called Boom—especially on the Argentine Julio Cortázar and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes—and on major authors after the Boom like the Chilean Roberto Bolaño. Contemporary Spanish American writers also continue to sing his praises. For example, in 2008 Mexican author Jorge Volpi and Peruvian writer Fernando Iwasaki coedited a new edition of Cortázar’s Poe translations in which they engaged sixty-seven current Spanish American and peninsular writers (including themselves) with Poe, inviting each contemporary author to write a brief introduction for one of Poe’s tales. This edition clearly shows Poe’s influence on the Boom and on the generation that followed. It also demonstrates the Poe advocacy of writers from both eras since, along with Cortázar’s translations and the sixty-seven contemporary introductions, the volume begins with an essay from Fuentes and another from the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa as prologues. 47

Perhaps the most pointed example of extended Poe advocacy in Spanish America comes from the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay. This example spans the twentieth century from the latter part of the modernista era well through the Boom via the works of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar—each author a major figure in Spanish American literary history, each indebted to Poe, and each a powerful advocate for Poe who helped to solidify his presence in the national/regional traditions of the Río de la Plata and in the broader literary polysystem of Spanish America.

A Trinity of Advocates

Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar, each in his own right, continue to wield significant influence over the literature of the Río de la Plata region and over Spanish American letters in general several decades after their respective deaths in 1937, 1986, and 1984, and each writer served and continues to serve as a powerful Poe advocate for Spanish-language readers. Grouping the three authors as a trinity rather than simply a trio might appear problematic on the surface since they did not hold a singular purpose, literary or otherwise. Indeed, Borges was a rather harsh critic of Quiroga’s writing, and Cortázar, while heavily influenced by and indebted to Borges’s poetics, clearly disagreed with his fellow Argentine’s politics. In their advocacy for Poe, however, these three literary giants find some common ground, although they each played distinct roles as Poe advocates. Each of these writers was influenced by Poe, and each one spent a significant amount of time responding to Poe. Quiroga’s advocacy can best be defined in terms of discipleship; Borges’s advocacy for Poe was multilayered, but many of his interactions with Poe (whether articles, prologues, or anthologized pieces) can all fit under the broader umbrella of the work of the literary critic; and Cortázar’s advocacy, although also multifaceted, remains most visible through his translations of the vast majority of Poe’s prose. The disciple, the critic, and the translator all spoke for, supported, and recommended Poe to their reading public. This trinity’s advocacy for Poe is matched only by the earlier trinity of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, whose French advocacy for Poe—to the bemusement of Borges and to the pleasure of Cortázar—had already placed Poe in a space of privilege in the Río de la Plata by the beginning of Quiroga’s career. 48

Quiroga’s Poe discipleship began early and continued throughout his publishing career, and Quiroga advocated for Poe via imitation of, conversation with, and prescription of the techniques and themes of his literary master. In the realm of imitation, Quiroga’s first attempt to re-create the horrors of revenge (felt both by the seeker of vengeance and by the victim) in Poe’s famous “The Cask of Amontillado” appeared as a brief prose entry entitled “El tonel de amontillado” in Quiroga’s first published book—a modernista collection of poetry titled Los arrecifes de coral that Quiroga published in 1901. 49 The very title reveals the lack of distance between this tale and Poe’s text since it is simply a translation of the title of Poe’s most famous revenge story. Quiroga’s piece begins: “Poe dice que, habiendo soportado del mejor modo posible las mil injusticias de Fortunato, juró vengarse cuando éste llegó al terreno de los insultos. Y nos cuenta cómo en una noche de carnaval le emparedó vivo, a pesar del ruido que hacía Fortunato con sus cascabeles” [“Poe says that, having tolerated in the best way posible the thousand injustices of Fortunato, he swore to avenge himself when Fortunato entered the territory of insult. And he tells us how in a night of carnival he walled Fortunato up alive, despite the noise that Fortunato made with his bells.”] 50 After this brief summary of Poe’s story, which strangely inserts Poe into the role of Montresor, Quiroga’s tale, in less than three hundred words, has a lime-covered Fortunato relate his “aventura anterior” [“previous adventure”] to the story’s narrator, Montresor—first in front of a large mirror and then in the catacombs where he attempts to reverse Poe’s tale by taking revenge on the narrator. 51 In Quiroga’s next rendition of this tale, “El crimen del otro” from 1904, he changes the setting to turn-of-the-century Montevideo, but he once again repeats Poe’s plotline as the narrator buries his friend—named Fortunto—alive. 52 In this rendering, the narrator does not seek revenge so much as try to rid himself of a friend whom he has driven mad by introducing him to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Although both of these stories interrogate the character of Montresor more than Poe’s source text, they do so only through a direct rewriting that relies overwhelmingly on Poe’s characters and plotline.

After these first two attempts, Quiroga repeatedly captures the horror of “Cask” and other Poe tales in several stories that seek to create Poe’s effect in new settings with original characters who have their own story arcs. As Caroline Egan has argued, two of these stories—“La lengua” and “Una bofetada” [“A Slap in the Face”]—subtly converse with “Cask” and the theme of revenge, 53 but several of Quiroga’s most famous stories create a Poe-like horror without even faintly referencing any of Poe’s source texts. For example, Quiroga’s “El almohadón de pluma” [“The Feather Pillow”] from 1907, “La miel silvestre” from 1911, and “El hijo” [“The Son”] from 1928 each creates a nervous tension that builds to a painful and horrific climax that leaves the reader both shocked and satisfied. 54 In all three cases, Quiroga relies on his own characters, settings, and plotlines rather than on Poe’s creations to develop this sense of horror. “La gallina degollada” [“The Decapitated Chicken”], perhaps Quiroga’s most masterful piece of horror fiction, finds a middle ground between his own creation and Poe’s influence. This 1909 tale creates a horrendous scene in which four sick brothers whose parents have treated them like animals kill their younger, healthy sister. 55 The setting and the plot are Quiroga’s, and while this story almost allows for a reading of the killing in terms of revenge that might put it in conversation with other Poe stories, it appears to more pointedly reference Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” since the boys, like the orangutan in Poe’s tale, imitate common human actions that create terrible outcomes. In Poe’s story, the orangutan’s aping of his master shaving leads to the vicious death of two women—a mother and a daughter (M 2: 565–568). In Quiroga’s story, the boys’ imitation of the decapitating and bleeding of the family’s evening meal—a chicken—leads to their sister’s brutal death and to the metaphorical destruction of their parents, who have placed all of their hopes in their one healthy child while neglecting their four disabled sons. 56 With a brilliant stroke, Quiroga taps into the latent horror of Poe’s initial detective story to create an effect that significantly veers away from the feeling of awe surrounding Dupin’s intellect toward a localized terror that Quiroga hones and masters during his prolific career.

Finally, along with imitating and then conversing with Poe’s works and methods, Quiroga eventually prescribed them to aspiring writers. In his 1925 article “El manual del perfecto cuentista,” Quiroga taps into Poe’s theory of effect by explaining that authors must know the end of a story before they write that story’s introduction. 57 In his 1928 article “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” he approaches the hopeful writer in even more didactic terms by listing ten rules for writing. His first rule, “[c]ree en un maestro—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chejov—como en Dios mismo” [“believe in a master—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekov—as in God himself”], reiterates his belief in following established models and reifies his Poe discipleship in the latter portion of his career. 58 His fifth rule echoes Poe’s theory of effect and the concept that authors must know where they want to arrive before they can start writing. 59

Quiroga’s discipleship functions as advocacy for Poe through both his fiction and his writing instructions. Englekirk notes that younger Spanish American writers in the 1930s were absorbing Poe via “Quiroga’s genius,” but his “Poesque spirit” 60 was still visible over sixty years later in an article by Bolaño from the late twentieth century. In a piece called “Consejos sobre el arte de escribir cuentos” [“Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories”], Bolaño takes up Quiroga’s model for offering tips on how to write short fiction, names Quiroga as one of the authors an aspiring writer needs to read, and claims that “[l]a verdad de la verdad es que con Edgar Allan Poe todos tendíamos de sobra” [“[t]he honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would have more than enough good material to read.”] 61 Quiroga, the Poe disciple, continues to speak for and recommend Poe both directly and indirectly.

Borges sustained a lengthy and complex literary relationship with Poe that included several types of advocacy. He translated two of Poe’s stories (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Purloined Letter”) with his friend and writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares, anthologized the former in Antología de la literatura fantástica and the latter in Los mejores cuentos policiales (two anthologies with major staying power that have each been reprinted several times since their original publication dates in the early 1940s), 62 responded to Poe’s Dupin tales with a detective trilogy of his own, conversed with several of Poe’s themes and creative ideas in his other fictional works, mentioned Poe in over 130 articles, and discussed Poe in scores of interviews and question/answer sessions. John T. Irwin has thoroughly examined Borges’s conscious conversation with Poe’s detective fiction in The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story , and I have analyzed Borges’s relationship with Poe beyond their detective stories in Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America . 63 Here, I would simply like to focus on Borges as a literary critic and public intellectual whose returns to Poe kept the US writer in the Argentine literary spotlight throughout the twentieth century.

Borges was an insatiable reader, and Poe was one of the writers whom Borges first encountered in his youth in his father’s library and whom he reread time and again throughout his long life. 64 After going blind in the mid-1950s, Borges continued to reread Poe by having the latter’s works read to him aloud by his mother (Leonor Acevedo de Borges), his students, his friends, and his second wife, María Kodama. 65 For example, as late as 1985, Borges claimed that he could no longer count the times that he had read and reread Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and suggested that he would continue rereading it in the future. 66 Borges could not stop reading Poe, and he could not stop writing and talking about him either. Borges wrote only two articles dedicated specifically to Poe—“La génesis de ‘El cuervo’ de Poe” in La Prensa in 1935 and “Edgar Allan Poe” in La Nación in 1949—but he mentioned Poe in over 130 other solo-authored pieces, often framing his discussions of detective fiction, US literature, translation, and several other subjects around Poe. 67 His references to Poe reached disparate reading audiences in Argentina, the Río de la Plata region, and Spanish America from the popular and local/national readers of the daily papers La Prensa and La Nación , to the middle-class and typically female audience of the household magazine El Hogar , to the highbrow and international readership of the literary journal Sur . Borges perennially returned to Poe in his public persona as well. He taught Poe in the classroom, mentioned Poe in lectures at university campuses and in public forums throughout the Americas and Europe, and talked about Poe in several interviews that were broadcast to wide audiences over the radio.

Borges, unlike Quiroga and Cortázar, was more willing to openly criticize Poe. He did not admire everything that Poe wrote, he was particularly critical of Poe’s poetry, and he occasionally questioned Poe’s taste. However, his praise for Poe as the inventor of the detective genre and as a powerful writer of the fantastic not only kept Poe in front of Borges’s local, regional, and international readerships, but it also created a new version of Poe in the Río de la Plata region and Spanish America in general. Despite Quiroga’s reciprocal relationship with Poe’s fiction, most Río de la Plata and Spanish American readers still considered Poe a poet during the last years of Quiroga’s life and the early years of Borges’s career. Borges’s advocacy permanently shifted Poe’s image from dark poet-prophet to masterful story writer. Borges was the type of advocate who admitted that Poe had weaknesses but championed him nonetheless. In this sense, Borges’s advocacy for Poe also resonates with the religious definition of the noun “advocate” since he acted as an agent between Poe and the reader in spite of what he saw as some of Poe’s literary “sins.” Borges did not ignore Poe’s problems, but he felt that the positive far outweighed the negative and asked that Poe’s readers judge Poe for his strengths and forgive him for his weaknesses.

Like Borges, Cortázar maintained a long and multilayered relationship with Poe that began in his youth and flourished during his adult life. Cortázar also read Poe as a child, and according to various personal accounts, he had to do so on the sly because his mother thought he “was too young.” 68 “[S]he was right,” Cortázar later claimed, and his earliest encounters with Poe’s texts purportedly scared him to the point of illness. 69 These early readings of Poe thrust Cortázar into the realm of the fantastic, a space that he thoroughly enjoyed as a reader and consistently recreated in his own work, particularly his short fiction. Several of Cortázar’s most famous short pieces—“Casa tomada” [“House Taken Over”], “Lejana” [“The Distances”], “La noche boca arriba” [“The Night Face Up”], “La isla al mediodía” [“The Island at Noon”], and “El ídolo de las Cíclades” [“The Idol of the Cyclades”]—function within this supernatural mode while others such as “Axolotl” or “Carta a una señorita en París” [“Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”] turn from the fantastic toward magical realism. 70 The theme of the double appears throughout Cortázar’s tales, and he often employs it in ways that resemble works by Poe. “Lejana,” for example, creates a powerful inversion of Poe’s “William Wilson” as Cortázar’s protagonist—Alina Reyes—literally loses herself in an open battle of wills against her double. 71 Cortázar’s first published story under his own name, “Casa tomada,” itself plays the double since one of the most common yet influential interpretations of the tale reads it as an Argentine doubling of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Although Cortázar’s stories spread Poe’s themes and approaches to new audiences, he advocated for Poe most powerfully as a translator. In a 1983 interview with Jason Weiss, Cortázar claimed that when translating Poe he learned to appreciate Poe’s language, regardless of the critiques that various English-speaking readers had offered: “I explored his language, which is highly criticized by the English and the Americans because they find it too baroque, in short they’ve found all sorts of things wrong with it. Well, since I’m neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn’t the slightest importance next to his genius.” 72 Cortázar spent two years in the early 1950s translating that genius into Spanish before becoming a famous writer in his own right, and he returned to, refined, and republished those translations over the next two decades, even though he had already made an international name for himself as a novelist and story writer.

Before the 1956 release of Cortázar’s two-volume set of Poe’s prose translations, Obras en prosa , no single Spanish-language translator in the Americas or on the Iberian Peninsula had tackled the majority of Poe’s fiction. 73 Poe’s poetry was readily available in Spanish translation, and many of his stories were also available, but the fictional titles were spread throughout disparate periodicals across Spain and the Americas, found in short collections in which a single translator would offer a dozen or so stories, or combined into larger collections that contained translations by several different translators. For example, the Argentine translator Carlos Olivera offered thirteen of Poe’s tales in Spanish as Novelas y cuentos in 1884; an anonymous collection of translations of twelve Poe tales appeared in Buenos Aires in 1903 under the Hispanicized Baudelaire title Historias extraordinarias ; and Armando Bazán edited a substantial Poe collection, Obras completas , that included, along with several poems, over forty prose pieces translated by five different translators. 74 Cortázar’s volumes, in contrast, include all of Poe’s short fiction, Pym, Eureka , and hundreds of pages of Poe’s other prose pieces. He republished both volumes in 1969, and then in 1970, he split the first volume into two, revised the translations, and published this new two-volume set as Cuentos, 1 and Cuentos, 2 . 75 Finally, in 1973, he revised and rereleased the second volume of his Obras en prosa as Ensayos y críticas . 76

Out of all of these translations and repackagings, the 1970 two-volume set of the stories has had, by far, the most significant impact. The Madrid publishing house Alianza has republished these two volumes over thirty times in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and these two books (often released as inexpensive paperback “libros de bosillo” or “pocket books”) are now almost synonymous with Poe in the Spanish-speaking world. In the introduction to their 2008 rerelease of Cortázar’s translations in their Edición comentada , Volpi and Iwasaki venerate this particular two-volume set, claiming that each of the sixty-seven writers whom they have chosen to introduce Poe’s stories have come to Poe via Cortázar’s two-volume edition of the tales and stating that their goal is to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial by “rescatando aquellos míticos tomitos azules” [“rescuing those mythic little blue volumes.”] 77 In short, Cortázar advocated for Poe by translating what he saw as Poe’s “extraordinary genius” 78 into Spanish, regardless of any perceived shortcomings with Poe’s language. His translations provided previously unprecedented access to that genius to millions of new readers through a single translation filter, and many of those readers, who are also writers, continue to distribute Cortázar’s Poe to future generations.

The Influence of the Stars

Throughout this essay, I have referred to both the general definition and the more specific, Christian definition of the noun “advocate.” I would like to end by playing with an older and more specific definition of the noun “influence.” The O xford English Dictionary shows that “influence” was used as a noun for almost three hundred years before it was used as a verb and that the oldest usage of the noun referred to a phenomenon between heavenly bodies and human bodies:

2. a. spec . in Astrol. The supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an etherial fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally. In later times gradually viewed less literally, as an exercise of power or “virtue,” or of an occult force, and in late use chiefly a poetical or humorous reflex of earlier notions. b. transf . The exercise of personal power by human beings, figured as something of the same nature as astral influence. Now only poet . 79

My use of “influence” throughout this essay, of course, typically refers to the “b” definition of the noun or to the common definitions of the verb, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “1. trans. To exert influence upon, to affect by influence. a. To affect the mind or action of; to move or induce by influence; [ . . . ] b. To affect the condition of, to have an effect on.” 80 The ancient and astral definition of the noun, however, also seems relevant. Baudelaire symbolically raised Poe into the heavens as a celestial advocate between himself and God, and Poe’s work and his image certainly appear to have had an elevated effect “upon the character and destiny of” many of his readers that could be compared to a “supposed flowing or streaming” from above. However, it took Baudelaire, Borges, Rampo, Bal’mont, Pessoa, and many other significant writers to elevate Poe to this level. These Poe advocates, literary stars during their own lifetimes, made him into a literary star who could then influence us, and his and their astral influence continue to affect other literary stars as well as the mere mortals or “sublunary” beings that we, Poe readers and scholars, tend to be.

One of these stars, Vargas Llosa, describes Poe as a fortunate writer, not in life, but in his posthumous rise to prominence through the work of two amazing advocates: “Aunque su vida estuvo marcada por la desgracia, Edgar Allan Poe fue uno de los más afortunados escritores modernos en lo que concierne a la irradiación de su obra por el mundo” [“Even though his life was marked by misfortune, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most fortunate modern writers in what concerns the irradiation of his work throughout the world”] because he was translated by both Baudelaire, the “poeta más grande del siglo XIX” [“greatest poet of the nineteenth century”], and Cortázar, “uno de los mejores escritores de nuestra lengua y un traductor excepcional” [“one of the best writers in our language and an exceptional translator.”] 81 To Vargas Llosa’s shortlist, we could add the names of dozens of other literary stars from distinct traditions who have served as Poe advocates. Some of these stars, Baudelaire-Mallarmé-Valéry and Quiroga-Borges-Cortázar, have formed guiding constellations that direct readers to Poe, while others have acted as solitary beacons that radiate Poe’s works and image. The advocacy of these literary stars—via translation, discipleship, rewriting, literary criticism, and other creative and critical endeavors—keeps Poe in orbit to shine down on future generations of readers and on occasional rising stars.

1. André Lefevere , Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: MLA, 1992), 6–7, 13–14. Lefevere uses the terms “rewrites” and “refractions” rather than “rewritings” in other works to describe the same concept. See “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with Interpretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm,” in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation , ed. Theo Hermans (New York: St. Martins, 1985), 215–243 ; and “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature,” in The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York & London: Routledge, 2012), 203–219.

This list could go on to include Poe’s hoaxes, his biting satires, and his contributions to science via Eureka: A Prose Poem .

3. I see this type of reciprocal influence functioning in two ways. The first way is fairly intuitive—translators, critics, anthologizers, biographers, and others openly affect how we understand and interpret the writers they approach in their work. The second way is less intuitive and recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s descriptions of influence in his famous essay “Kafka y sus precursores” [“Kafka and His Precursors”] in which Borges argues that newer writers influence the works of older writers by changing us, the readers, so that we see the work of a newer writer in the work of an older writer and, thus, experience the strange, anachronistic sensation of seeing Kafka in a poem by Robert Browning or in a text by Søren Kierkegaard and feeling that these earlier texts are actually Kafkaesque. See “Kafka y sus precursores,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2007), 2:107–109 and “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Selected Non-Fictions , ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999), 363–365.

5. Rufus Wilmot Griswold , “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New-York Daily Tribune , October 9, 1849, p. 2, cols. 3–4, Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/nyt49100.htm .

6. See, for example, George R. Graham , “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine (Philadelphia), March 1850, 36:224–226, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/18500301.htm ; Henry B. Hirst , “Edgar Allan Poe,” McMakin’s Model American Courier , vol. XIX, no. 33 (whole no. 969), October 20, 1849, p. 2, cols. 3–4, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/hbh18491.htm ; or Nathaniel Parker Willis , “Death of Edgar Poe,” Home Journal (New York), October 20, 1849, p. 2, cols. 2–4, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/18491020.htm .

7. Thomas Stearns Eliot , “From Poe to Valéry,” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 205–219.

8. Célestin Pierre Cambiaire , The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1927) ; Partick F. Quinn , The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) ; Lois Davis Vines , Valéry and Poe: A Literary Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Also see Vines’s chapters in Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities , ed. Lois Davis Vines (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999) ; and “Poe Translations in France,” in Translated Poe , ed. Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014), 47–54.

9. John Eugene Englekirk , Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1934). There are many other titles that tackle Poe’s relationship with specific national or regional literary traditions—books on Poe and Scandinavia, Poe and Germany, Poe and Japan, or Poe and Russia, for example.

10. Benjamin Franklin Fisher , ed., Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986) ; Lois Davis Vines , ed., Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999) ; Barbara Cantalupo , ed., Poe’s Pervasive Influence (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012) ; Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato , eds., Translated Poe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014).

11. Charles Baudelaire , Œuvres complétes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 642 ; Christopher Isherwood , trans., My Heart Laid Bare , in Intimate Journals (New York: Howard Fertig, 1977), 61.

Oxford English Dictionary Online , s.v. “advocate.”

14. Lois Davis Vines , “Poe Translations in France,” in Translated Poe , 48. Vines also notes that Baudelaire translated four of Poe’s poems (48–49).

Vines, “Poe Translations in France,” 49.

Vines,“Poe Translations in France,” 49.

19. Stéphane Mallarmé , “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” Œuvres complétes. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 38.

Vines avers that “[t]he unpublished manuscript of an early draft of Valéry’s Evening with Monsieur Teste bears the title ‘Memoirs of Chevalier Dupin’ ” (51).

21. Itamar Even-Zohar , “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2012), 162–167.

Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature,” 163.

Poe’s centrality to the French literary canon is clearly demonstrated by the fact that he was the first non-French writer included in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and the fifth writer, regardless of language, included in this monumental series. The Pléiade edition of Poe, which uses Baudelaire’s translations, was first published in April 1932, only six months after the series published its first book—the first volume of Baudelaire’s complete works. See “Le catalogue—Par année de parution,” La Pléiade, http://www.la-pleiade.fr/Le-catalogue/Par-annee-de-parution, for historical details about books published in this series.

25. Elvira Osipova , “The History of Poe Translations in Russia,” in Translated Poe , 73.

26. Osipova, 73 , and Eloise M. Boyle , “Valery Brjusov and Konstantin Bal’mont,” in Poe Abroad , 177–182. For a monograph-length study of Poe in Russia, see Joan Delaney Grossman , Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: A Study in Legend and Literary Influence (Würzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1973).

27. Liviu Cotrău , “Edgar Allan Poe in Romanian Translation,” in Translated Poe , 77.

Cotrău, “Edgar Allan Poe in Romanian Translation,” 77–84.

29. Margarida Vale de Gato , “Poe Translations in Portugal: A Standing Challenge for Changing Literary Systems,” in Translated Poe , 9–10.

Essays in Poe Abroad, Poe’s Pervasive Influence , and Translated Poe demonstrate Poe’s presence in China and South Korea, but more research into the literary traditions of these two nations would need to be conducted in order to discover whether important artists in these two countries who are influenced by Poe also act as Poe advocates.

31. Takayuki Tatsumi , “The Double Task of the Translator: Poe and His Japanese Disciples,” in Translated Poe , 171. For more on Poe’s relationship with Japan, see Noriko Mizuta Lippit’s pair of essays in Poe Abroad , several essays in Poe’s Pervasive Influence , and Scott Miller’s analysis of Japanese translations of “The Black Cat” in Translated Poe , 261–270 and 416–417.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 167–168.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 168–171.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 171–172.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 172, emphasis in the original.

36. For Spanish America, see Esplin , “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction: Edgar Allan Poe’s Reception and Influence in Spanish American from the Beginnings through the Boom,” Resources for American Literary Study 4 (2007): 31–54. For Brazil, see Carlos Daghlian , “Poe in Brazil,” in Poe Abroad , 130–134.

Daghlian, “Poe in Brazil,” 130.

38. Clarice Lispector , trans., Histórias Extraordinárias , by Edgar Allan Poe (Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 1998). This book appeared in a series for youth readers entitled Clássicos para o Jovem Leitor .

39. Lenita Esteves , “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Edgar Poe in the Brazilian Literary System,” in Translated Poe , 157.

Esteves, “The Unparalleled Adventure,” 158.

For details about the early reception of Poe in Spanish America, see Esplin, “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction,” 33–38.

42. Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde , trans., “El cuervo” by Edgar Allan Poe , 1887, in J. A. Pérez Bonalde: Estudio preliminar de Pedro Pablo Paredes , ed. Pedro Pablo Paredes (Caracas: Academia Venezolana, 1964), 2:151–157.

43. Rubén Darío , Azul , 1888 (Buenos Aires: Espasa- Calpe, 1945) ; Darío , “Los raros,” 1893, in Obras completas (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950), 2:245–517.

See Esplin, “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction,” 35–38 and 43–46, for a comparative analysis of Pérez Bonalde’s translation, “El cuervo,” and Carlos Obligado’s more meticulous version of the poem from 1932.

Darío, “Los raros,” 267, my translation.

Englekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature , 146.

47. Fernando Iwasaki and Jorge Volpi , eds., Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , by Edgar Allan Poe , trans. Julio Cortázar , prologues by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2008).

48. Borges notes in several texts that he thinks it is strange that Poe, a writer born in Boston, makes his way to Argentina via France. See, for example, Borges , “Prólogo de prólogos,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2007), 4:13 ; and Borges , “Sobre los clásicos,” in Páginas de Jorge Luis Borges: Seleccionadas por el autor (Buenos Aires: Celtia, 1982), 231. Cortázar, contrastingly, calls Baudelaire “el doble de Edgar Allan Poe” [“the double of Edgar Allan Poe”] and claims to have kept a copy of Baudelaire’s Poe translations nearby while translating Poe into Spanish. See Ernesto González Bermejo , Conversaciones con Julio Cortázar (Barcelona: Editora y Distribuidora Hispano Americana, 1978), 35–36.

49. Horacio Quiroga , “El tonel de amontillado,” 1901, in Todos los cuentos (Madrid: Allca, 1997), 813. The few prose pieces from Los arrecifes de coral appear in Todos los cuentos from pages 807–824.

Quiroga, “El tonel de amontillado,” 813, my translation.

Quiroga, “El tonel de amontillado,” 813.

52. Quiroga , “El crimen de otro,” 1904, in Todos los cuentos , 871–879.

53. Caroline Egan , “Revivification and Revision: Horacio Quiroga’s Reading of Poe,” The Comparatist 35 (2011): 239–248.

54. Quiroga , “El almohadón de pluma,” “La miel silvestre,” and “El hijo,” in Todos los cuentos , 97–102, 122–128, and 752–757. The Quiroga titles for which I provide English translations all come from Margaret Sayers Peden , trans., The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories , by Horacio Quiroga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).

55. Quiroga , “La gallina degollada,” 1911, in Todos los cuentos , 89–96 ; Peden , trans., “The Decapitated Chicken,” in The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories , 49–56.

Quiroga, “La gallina degollada,” 94–95; “The Decapitated Chicken,” 55–56 .

57. Quiroga , “El manual del perfecto cuentista,” in Todos los cuentos , 1189–1191.

58. Quiroga , “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” in Todos los cuentos , 1194–1195 , my translation.

Quiroga, “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” 1194–1195.

Englekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature , 368.

61. Roberto Bolaño , “Consejos sobre el arte de escribir cuentos,” in Entre paréntesis (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004), 324–325 ; Bolaño , “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories,” trans. David Draper Clark , World Literature Today 80, no. 6 (2006): 48–49. Although published in 2004, Bolaño begins the essay by noting that he is forty-four years old, showing that he wrote the essay in 1997 or 1998.

62. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares , trans., “La verdad sobre el caso de M. Valdemar,” by Edgar Allan Poe , in Antología de la literatura fantástica , 1940, eds. Jorge Luis Borges , Bioy Casares , and Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1971), 371–379 ; Borges and Bioy Casares , trans., “La carta robada,” by Edgar Allan Poe , in Los mejores cuentos policiales , 1943, eds. Borges and Bioy Casares (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997), 23–38.

63. John T. Irwin , The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) ; Esplin , Borges’s Poe: The Influence and the Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

64. Borges often mentioned reading Poe in his childhood. See, for example, Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni , “Autobiographical Notes,” New Yorker , September 19, 1970, 42 and 78.

Copies of books by Poe held at the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges and at Argentina’s national library in the Sala del Tesoro reveal Borges’s continual return to Poe. The books contain notes in Borges’s hand, in Leonor Acevedo de Borges’s hand, and/or in Kodama’s hand.

66. Borges , “Prólogo,” in Edgar Allan Poe, La carta robada , ed. Franco Maria Ricci . (Madrid: Siruela, 1985), 12–13.

67. Borges , “La génesis de ‘El cuervo’ de Poe,” La Prensa (Buenos Aires), August 25, 1935 ; Borges , “Edgar Allan Poe,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), October 2, 1949 , sec. 2. For detailed accounts of Borges’s Poe references, see Esplin , “Jorge Luis Borges’s References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 1,” Poe Studies 48 (2015): 120–160 ; and “Jorge Luis Borges’s References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 2,” Poe Studies 49 (2016): 128–159.

68. Jason Weiss , “Writing at Risk: Interview with Julio Cortázar,” in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar , ed. Jamie Alazraki (New York: G. K. Hall & Company, 1999), 73. Cortázar makes similar claims in François Hébert’s “An Interview with Julio Corázar,” in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar , 62.

Weiss, “Writing at Risk,” 73; Hébert, “An Interview with Julio Corázar,” 62.

70. Although originally published in various collections, each of these Cortázar short stories is available in Cortázar , Relatos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1970). All of the cited English translations of Cortázar’s stories except “The Island at Noon” are available in Cortázar , Blow-Up and Other Stories , trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1967).   “The Island at Noon” appears in Cortázar, All Fires the Fire , trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York, Pantheon, 1973), 90–98.

Cortázar, “Lejana,” 437–438; Cortázar, “The Distances,” 26–27.

Weiss, “Writing at Risk,” 73.

73. Julio Cortázar , trans., Obras en prosa by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente; Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1956).

74. Carlos Olivera , trans., Novelas y cuentos , by Edgar Allan Poe (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1884) ; Edgar Allan Poe , Historias extraordinarias (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca de la Nación, 1903) ; and Armando Bazán , ed., Obras completas , by Edgar Allan Poe (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1944).

75. Cortázar , trans., Obras en prosa by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Barcelona: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1969) ; Cortázar , trans., Cuentos , by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1970).

76. Cortázar , trans., Ensayos y críticas by Edgar Allan Poe (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1973).

77. Volpi and Iwasaki , “Poe & Cía,” in Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , 13.

Weiss, Writing at Risk,” 73.

81. Mario Vargas Llosa , “Poe y Cortázar,” Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , 19–20.

Cantalupo, Barbara , ed. Poe’s Pervasive Influence . Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012 .

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Englekirk, John Eugene.   Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature . New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1934 .

Esplin, Emron. “ From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction: A Map of Edgar Allan Poe’s Reception and Influence in Spanish America from the Beginnings through the Boom. ” Resources for American Literary Study 31 ( 2006 ): 31–54.

Esplin, Emron , and Margarida Vale de Gato , eds. Translated Poe . Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014 .

Even-Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” In The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), edited by Lawrence Venuti , 162–167. New York: Routledge, 2012 .

Fisher, Benjamin Franklin , ed. Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities . Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986 .

Iwasaki, Fernando , and Jorge Volpi , eds. Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , by Edgar Allan Poe . Translated by Julio Cortázar . Prologues by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa . Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2008 .

Lefevere, André . Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context . New York: MLA, 1992 .

Quinn, Patrick F.   The French Face of Edgar Poe . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957 .

Vines, Lois Davis.   Valéry and Poe: A Literary Legacy . New York: New York University Press, 1992 .

Vines, Lois Davis , ed. Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999 .

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Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics & Ideas

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Southern gothic literature.

• Thomas Ærvold Bjerre Thomas Ærvold Bjerre University of Southern Denmark
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.304
• Published online: 28 June 2017

Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic.

While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. On top of this, Faulkner’s complex, modernist, labyrinthine language creates in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation. The generation of southern writers after Faulkner continued the exploration of the clashes between Old and New South. Writers like Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), Carson McCullers (1917–1967), and Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) drew on Gothic elements. O’Connor’s work is particularly steeped in the grotesque, a subgenre of the Gothic. African American writers like Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Richard Wright have had their own unique perspective on the Southern Gothic and the repressed racial tensions at the heart of the genre. Southern Gothic also frames the bleak and jarringly violent stories by contemporary so-called Rough South writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Dorothy Allison, William Gay, and Ron Rash. A sense of evil lurks in their stories and novels, sometimes taking on the shape of ghosts or living dead, ghouls who haunt the New Casino South and serve as symbolic reminders of the many unresolved issues still burdening the South to this day.

• Southern literature
• Gothic literature
• Southern Gothic
• the U. S. South

William Faulkner

• Edgar Allan Poe
• Flannery O’Connor

From the Gothic to American Gothic to Southern Gothic

“Southern Gothic” is the label attached to a particular strain of literature from the American South. The style of writing has evolved from the American Gothic tradition, which again evolved from the English Gothic tradition. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto ( 1765 ) is considered the first Gothic novel, and Ann Radcliffe is seen as a cofounder of the genre thanks to Gothic romances such as The Mysteries of Udolpho ( 1794 ) and The Italian ( 1797 ). Several scholars have attempted to categorize the Gothic: H. L. Malchow defines it not as a genre but a discourse, “a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety.” 1 David Punter points to the themes of paranoia, the barbaric, and taboo, 2 and Allan Lloyd-Smith states that the Gothic is “about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself.” 3 Specific definitions aside, Gothic literature generally challenged Enlightenment principles by giving voice to irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses, thereby conjuring an angst-ridden world of violence, sex, terror, and death. As Jerrold Hogle notes, since the 18th century, Gothic fiction has enabled readers to “address and disguise some of the most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural.” 4

The Gothic finds its footing in the United States in the early 19th century. Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, is credited with inventing the American Gothic novel with Wieland ( 1798 ). According to Eric Savoy, what makes Brown’s novel stand out is the way in which it “resituate[s] ‘history’ in a pathologized return of the repressed whereby the present witnesses the unfolding and fulfillment of terrible destinies incipient in the American past.” 5 Apart from Brockden Brown, scholars have found it difficult to pinpoint a foundational era or group of authors for the American Gothic. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler has argued that the American Gothic tradition is best understood as “a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement,” 6 and Teresa Goddu has noted “the difficulty of defining the genre in national terms.” 7 Some scholars have listed criteria in order to define the genre. Allan Lloyd Smith sees “four indigenous features” marking the American Gothic as distinct from the European version: “the frontier, the Puritan legacy, race, and political utopianism.” 8 Yet others hesitate at using the term “genre” and talk instead of the Gothic as “a discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness.” 9 What critics do seem to agree on, however, is the way in which American Gothic texts in general have challenged the American Dream narrative by consistently pointing out limitations and aberrations in the progressive belief in possibility and mobility. Eric Savoy points out the irony of the Gothic’s predominance in American culture. In a nation whose master narrative is grounded in rationalism, progress, and egalitarianism, Savoy points to “the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday life.” 10

Nowhere in the United States is the Gothic more present than in the South, which Allison Graham describes as a “repository of national repressions … the benighted area ‘down there’ whose exposure to the light is unfailingly horrifying and thrilling.” 11 Flannery O’Connor famously declared that the so-called Southern school of literature conjured up “an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of a preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque.” 12 Add to this Benjamin Fisher’s definition of the literary Gothic as something that evokes “anxieties, fears, terrors, often in tandem with violence, brutality, rampant sexual impulses, and death,” 13 and it becomes clear how the tradition of the Southern Gothic plays into already established ideas about the South as an “ill” region. This notion was established early on, as Charles Reagan Wilson has shown: the “deadly climate that nurtured diseases” and killed off early Jamestown settlers, and later colonists in Lowcountry North Carolina created an image of the South as “a death trap.” 14 Centuries later, William Faulkner, arguably the greatest Southern Gothic writer, has one of his characters in As I Lay Dying ( 1930 ) echo this view of the South: “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” 15 Another central figure of Southern Gothic, Tennessee Williams, continues in the same vein, when he writes that, “there is something in the region, something in the blood and culture, of the Southern state[s] that has somehow made them the center of this Gothic school of writers.” These writers share “a sense, an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.” 16

While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, the Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the region’s tensions and aberrations. The United States may not have had old castles in which writers could place their Gothic romances, but after the Civil War, the many often ruined or decaying plantations and mansions in the South became uncanny locations for Gothic stories about sins, secrets, and the “haunting history” of the South. 17 And while Southern Gothic can be said to fulfill the criteria set out by scholars like Punter and Smith, increasingly, Gothic in an American context has come to connote the American South. During the 20th century, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. 18 As Charles L. Crow points out, the term “Southern Gothic” “became so common in the modern period that each word came to evoke the other,” 19 as southern writers increasingly explored a region burdened with contradictory images. On the one hand, the colonial and antebellum South has been constructed as a pastoral idyll, an agrarian garden free of toil. On the other hand, the South has been seen as a repository for all of America’s shortcomings: a region of sickness and backwardness symbolized by everything from yellow fever and hookworm disease to personal and societal violence.

Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the vision of the idyllic South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. In this way, Southern Gothic texts mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts or grotesque figures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Leslie Fiedler’s claim that the “proper subject for American gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged” 20 helps explain the propensity, the pull of the Gothic in southern literature. Its uncanny and haunted effects echo the old Gothic tradition but serve as a specific comment on southern life and customs.

The Southern Grotesque

A subgenre or additional aspect of Southern Gothic is the grotesque, also called Southern Grotesque. Scholars have long argued about the differences between the two terms, and many simply equate the two and use them interchangeably. As Charles Crow notes, the grotesque, “is a quality that overlaps with the Gothic, but neither is necessary or sufficient for the other.” 21 Characters with physical deformities, so-called freaks, feature heavily in the Southern Grotesque. Often, their physical disfigurements—limps, wooden legs, cross-eyes, crippled limbs—serve as markers of a corrupt moral compass and point to the ways in which writers of Southern Gothic engage with the discrepancy between perceived, heteronormative normalcy and the repressed realities beneath that assumption. While deformed characters may be one of the most evident markers of Southern Gothic, 22 the grotesque has been credited with invoking everything from “horror and the uncanny” to “sadness, compassion or humour.” 23 The apparent breadth of grotesque traits threatens to empty the term of any useful meaning. But what unites the many features of the grotesque as well as its effects is a disturbing juxtaposition of conflicting elements; a site of transgression that serves to challenge the normative status quo, which in the South has been particularly repressive when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality. This links the Southern Grotesque to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, which, among other things, functions as a strategy of transgression, resistance, and disruption. 24 This disruption that the grotesque produces is not of the “aberrant body,” as Melissa Free argues, “but of the social body that silences and condemns deviance.” 25 Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the best example of a Southern Gothic writer who relies on the grotesque in her work. In her influential essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” ( 1969 ), O’Connor challenged the reductive generalization of the grotesque as a term and stressed how grotesque literature pointed toward a particular kind of realism:

In these grotesque works … the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected … It’s not necessary to point out that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine. 26

Rather than a sensationalist freak or horror show, grotesque literature cuts through the veil of civility, through decorum and oppressive normative fabrications to expose a harsh, confusing reality of contradictions, violence, and aberrations.

Early Southern Gothic

Early examples of Southern Gothic effects or elements can be found in playwright William Bulloch Maxwell ( 1787–1814 ), poets Edward Coote Pinkney ( 1802–1828 ) and Richard Henry Wilde ( 1789–1847 ), and novelist John Pendleton Kennedy ( 1795–1870 ). Kennedy’s best-known novel, Swallow Barn ( 1835 ), often credited as a precursor of the plantation novel, features an overall Gothic landscape with a “Goblin Swamp” and a remote country house, which takes the place of the castles and mansions of the British Gothic. More overt Gothic elements are found in Kennedy’s third novel Rob of the Bowl ( 1838 ), where a supposedly haunted chapel terrifies the locals with its nightly groans and rumbles.

The Southern Gothic finds more solid form in the works of William Gilmore Simms ( 1806–1870 ). Perhaps best known for his frontier-based adventure novels such as The Yemassee ( 1835 ) influenced by Sir Walter Scott, several of Simms’s poems and novels rely on supernatural elements in his adaptation of Gothicism to specific southern locales. The aggressive title character of Martin Faber ( 1833 ) is a perverse Byronic figure, who confesses to murdering the innocent maiden Emily so he can marry the affluent Constance. Castle Dismal ( 1844 ) is a South Carolina ghost story that subverts traditional notions of marriage and domesticity—and features a narrator who spends a night in a haunted chamber of an old mansion. And Woodcraft ( 1854 ), the final of Simms’s Revolutionary War novels features devilish British villains, and in the Widow Eveleigh, Simms creates a more sophisticated version of the “persecuted maidens and wives in European Gothics.” 27

Edgar Allan Poe ( 1809–1849 ) became the first writer to fully explore the potential of the Southern Gothic. Many of Poe’s best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic: the decaying house (and the family within); men and women driven half-mad by unexplained anxieties; and transgressive racial and sexual subjects involving identity, incest, and necrophilia. It is hard to overestimate the influence of Poe and “The Fall of the House of Usher” ( 1839 ), considered by many “the Ur-text of the Southern Gothic.” 28 Featuring a decrepit mansion, characters sick in body and mind, a live burial in a cellar vault, and doppelgängers, the story is saturated by an “insufferable gloom,” 29 an overall Gothic mood that has led William Moss to declare that “on the ruins of the house of Usher, Poe lays the foundation of a Southern Gothic.” 30

In addition, Poe has been seen as a central figure of the Southern Gothic because of his treatment of race, what Eric Savoy calls his “profound meditation upon the cultural significance of ‘blackness’ in the white American mind.” 31 Christopher Walsh attributes “Poe’s value to the development of the Southern Gothic … to his ability to destabilize hierarchies of order and to critique the South’s prevailing mythology and narrative.” 32 An example of this is “The Black Cat” ( 1843 ), in which the narrator describes his plunge “into excess” when he is overcome by “the spirit of PERVERSENESS.” 33 The story draws on classic staples of the Gothic: a perverse and murderous tyrant using atrocious violence against helpless victims, a live burial and a decaying corpse “clotted with gore,” 34 as well as the ruins of a burned-down house. But beneath the macabre surface is a more profound examination of the particularly southern sentimentalization of the relationship between master and slave. 35

Discrediting the Southern Gothic

During the 20th century, the veneration for Poe increased steadily, and scholars recognized his indelible influence on the Southern Gothic. However, in his own time, most 19th-century literary scholars and critics did much to discredit Poe as well as the Gothic genre on a national level and to gloss over traces of the Gothic in works of canonical national writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Consensus seemed to be that “Gothic was an inferior genre incapable of high seriousness and appealing only of readers of questionable tastes.” 36 Poe was initially exorcized from the national literary canon and relegated to the confines of the nation’s benighted “other”: the South. But scholars and critics of southern literature were not too impressed with the Gothic elements either. In fact, the term “Southern Gothic,” referring to a subgenre or school of writers, was initially coined in 1935 by novelist Ellen Glasgow, who used the term to criticize what she called “the inflamed rabble of impulses in the contemporary Southern novel.” 37 Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and other New Southern writers, she asserted, displayed a disturbing tendency of “aimless violence” and “fantastic nightmares.” 38 In the same year, in an article titled “The Horrible South,” Gerald Johnson claimed that T. S. Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell had established “a certain reputation for Southern writing.” He labeled them “the merchants of death, hell and the grave … the horror-mongers in chief.” 39 Likewise, in New Republic ’s 1952 review of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood , Isaac Rosenfeld complained about the author’s focus on degeneracy in “an insane world, peopled by monsters and submen.” 40 Attitudes like this made Tennessee Williams scoff at the “disparaging critics … some of the most eminent book critics” as well as “publishers, distributors, not to mention the reading public” whose “major line of attack” is that the Southern Gothic is “ dreadful .” 41 Indeed, many writers of pulp fiction have relied heavily on the clichéd conception of the South as violent, backwards, and degenerate—and found a large number of readers in the process. But proletarian (and Gothic) writers like Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers, whose literary qualities are no longer deemed spurious, were often marginalized by the Agrarians. In the 1930s, the accepted view of poor whites was that they “did not exist; or, if they did, they existed outside of ‘civilization.’ They were irredeemably ‘other,’ marking the outer limits of the culture.” For many of the Agrarians, Richard Gray notes, “to write of the ‘unknown people’ of the Southern countryside was not to write as a Southerner; it was doubtful if it was even to write as an American.” 42 It was not only white writers who were excluded from the canon. Michael Kreyling notes how the Agrarians and their “disciples in the 1940s and 1950s” obstructed “the inclusion of black writers,” like Richard Wright. 43

Despite Poe’s status as a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner is widely considered the most important and influential writer working in the vein of the Southern Gothic.

Faulkner’s dense and complex fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. In fact, his oft-quoted line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” 44 which has come to serve as a clichéd definition of Faulkner’s works, is also a definition of the Gothic. The clash between Old South and New South takes on a Gothic hue in which the suppressed sins of slavery, patriarchy, and class strife bubble to the surface in uncanny ways. And all this takes place in a landscape of swamps, deep woods, and decaying plantations. Add to this the complex, modernist, labyrinthine language of Faulkner’s works, which create in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation, an impression that, as Fred Botting says, “there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language.” 45

Much of Faulkner’s work, novels as well as short stories, belongs in the Southern Gothic category. The often anthologized “A Rose for Emily” ( 1930 ) is perhaps the clearest example of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism. The story, narrated from a plural point of view by inhabitants of the small town, tells of the spinster Emily Grierson, who after her father’s death scandalizes the community when she takes up with the northern carpetbagger Homer Barron. When Homer disappears shortly after Emily has purchased arsenic, rumors abound in town. Decades later, after living a reclusive life, Emily dies. When the townspeople break open the door to an upstairs room, they discover a man’s “fleshless” corpse on the bed, the remains of him “rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt.” 46 Next to the corpse is a pillow, with “the indentation of a head” and “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” 47 The story’s themes of necrophilia, sin, and secrecy mark it as obviously Gothic, yet Richard Gray argues that it also “offers an unerring insight into repression and the revenge of the repressed.” Emily’s actions should be seen as “a perverse reaction to the pressures of a stiflingly patriarchal society,” the way she has been “reduced, by the gaze of her neighbours and the narrative, to object status, a figure to patronise and pity … The extremity of her actions is,” he argues, “ultimately, a measure of the extremity of her condition, the degree of her imprisonment.” 48

Other examples of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism can be found in many of his greatest novels. The Sound and the Fury ( 1929 ) traces the downfall of the Compson family, one of Faulkner’s many “failed dynasties of the old ascendancy … all unwitting builders of haunted houses.” 49 The novel’s first three sections are narrated by the three Compson sons—the mentally handicapped Benjy, the brooding Quentin, and the malicious and patriarchal Jason—while the fourth and final section has the black maid Dilsey as the central character. This makes for a fragmented and unreliable story in the center of which is the Compson daughter, Caddy—the obsession of all three brothers, “both victim and perpetrator … [a] Gothic heroine” who “escapes her haunted mansion at a terrible price.” 50 Quentin is haunted and obsessed with his failure to protect his sister’s virginity. His oppressive sense of guilt eventually drives him to suicide. As I Lay Dying ( 1930 ) features variations of the vengeful spirit and live burial themes as well as emotionally unstable characters, all supported by an overall sense of confusion and fragmentation brought on by the rapidly shifting narrators. Sanctuary ( 1931 ), Faulkner’s most sensational and scandalous novel, features a controversial rape scene where the debutante Temple Drake is penetrated with a corncob by the sadistic and impotent villain Popeye. Though initially scorned by critics, Sanctuary has more recently been re-examined in light of its mirror structure and also “revalued as symbolic of the rape of southern womanhood by outside forces.” 51 Light in August ( 1932 ) has been read as “an exemplary of the traditional gothic tale of mystery, horror, and violence in America.” 52 It is a novel fueled by a sense of alienation and otherness, and features marginalized characters attempting but failing to make human connections. Joe Christmas, a black man passing as white, is accused of sleeping with and murdering a white woman. After escaping from jail, he is castrated and killed. The novel’s Gothicism is significantly southern in its exploration of religious zeal, sex, and racism, including violent lynchings and the pervasive fear of miscegenation.

Many critics and scholars seem to agree that Absalom, Absalom! ( 1936 ) is “one of the great Southern Gothic novels” and, according to Richard Gray, Faulkner’s “greatest and most seamlessly gothic narrative.” 53 Several scholars have noted the influence of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” At Harvard, Quentin Compson tries to explain the South to his Canadian roommate, Shreve. He relies on stories told to him, by people who were told by someone else, most circling around the powerful figure of Thomas Sutpen, “ a demon, a villain .” 54 The resulting story becomes an “interpretive act of the imagination,” and the various chroniclers “exaggerate fact into myth and transform history into legend.” 55 Thomas Sutpen emerges as an elusive but tragic figure. As a poor boy he was turned away at the door of a plantation house by a black servant. This made him vow never to be put in that position again. He is determined to build his own plantation, complete with land, slaves, a family, and the hope of a male heir. This is Sutpen’s design, and Absalom, Absalom! patches together his ruthless determination to fulfill it. From Sutpen’s rejection of his mixed race wife and son in the West Indies to his creation of Sutpen’s Hundred and his calculating marriage to Ellen Coldfield, to the return of his rejected son, and the eventual tragedy, the novel is a complex web of race, gender, pride, shame, sin, and the repressive burdens of the past.

Southern Gothic after Faulkner

Even though Eudora Welty ( 1909–2001 ) herself rejected being labeled a Gothic writer, she is nevertheless considered a transitional figure in the Southern Gothic from Faulkner to more contemporary writers. Some scholars, such as Ruth D. Weston, have argued that Welty should not be placed in the Southern Gothic category. In her study Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty ( 1994 ), Weston distinguishes between the traditional (English) “upper case” Gothic, which she characterizes as “‘escape’ fiction,” and then a “core of gothic (lower case) materials—plots, settings, characters, image patterns, and vocabulary.” 56 It is this latter patchwork that Welty draws on, according to Weston. She claims that Welty’s “earliest and most basic use of gothic convention is in her landscapes,” 57 especially the history-haunted Natchez Trace, which is an ideal setting for Gothic themes of enclosure and escape. More recently, however, scholars have challenged Weston’s reluctance to place Welty firmly in the Southern Gothic tradition and have relied on feminist theory to elucidate how Welty employed Gothic settings and characters to stress the ways in which mythic southern narratives have silenced and repressed Others. In A Curtain of Green ( 1941 ), Susan V. Donaldson argues, Welty writes forth “a full-fledged carnival of gothic and grotesque heroines running amok, resistant to placement in traditional plots and roles.” 58

Where Eudora Welty did much to distance herself from being called a Gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor ( 1925–1964 ) is perhaps the best-known practitioner of the Southern Grotesque. Her many stories and her two novels are packed with an abundance of Gothic motifs, summarized by Chad Rohman as “monstrous misfits, devils and demonic figures, perpetrators and victims, doubles and doppelgängers , freaks and the deformed, madness and mad acts, ghosts and kindly spirits, and physical and spiritual isolation.” 59 Marked by “an aesthetic of extremes” 60 characteristic of the grotesque, O’Connor’s world is infused with a sense of “mystery and the unexpected,” as she notes in her essay on the grotesque. 61 Grounded in her Catholic faith, her view of life as “essentially mysterious” results in her belief that in order to capture that life as realistically as possible, her fiction is necessarily “going to be wild … violent and comic, because of the discrepancies it seeks to combine.” 62

Good examples of both the Gothic and grotesque features of O’Connor’s work are found in two of her most canonized short stories. In “Good Country People” ( 1955 ), the nihilistic and pseudo-intellectual Hulga still lives at home at the age of thirty-two. She has a “weak heart,” a wooden leg, and a doctoral degree in philosophy. When a “sincere and genuine” nineteen-year-old Bible salesman turns up at the house, Hulga decides to demonstrate her superiority by seducing him. But he turns out to be a conman who seduces her, only to steal her wooden leg and leave her stranded in a barn loft. “You ain’t so smart,” he tells her before leaving, “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” 63 And in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” ( 1955 ), a family road trip takes a shocking, violent turn when the characters come upon the escaped convict The Misfit. When the grandmother announces his identity, The Misfit orders the family killed. After killing the grandmother himself, he observes that, “She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 64 Both stories feature shocking endings meant to jar readers. As O’Connor noted of her own writing, to make stories work, “what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and … for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.” 65 It is in the climax of her stories and novels that the characters—and readers—get a brief glimpse of the mystery O’Connor alludes to, of the possibility of redemption or salvation. But as the stories show, redemption often comes at a terrible price. Hulga is stripped of her superciliousness and forced to face reality by a larcenous Bible salesman, but one who is described with Christ-like imagery on the last page: a “blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.” 66 In a more extreme version, the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is also a character who sees herself as morally superior. Yet faced with annihilation, she tells her killer, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” 67

O’Connor’s two novels are both explorations of religious fundamentalism in the Deep South. In Wise Blood ( 1952 ), World War II veteran Hazel Motes returns to his Tennessee home to find it decaying and decrepit. Having lost his faith during the war, he takes to the city of Taulkinham, intent on spreading his atheist doctrine in his Church Without Christ. Yet he feels haunted by Christ and by gothic nightmares of being buried alive. Spiraling ever downwards, Motes ends up killing his competitor and doppelganger Solace Layfield, before a final act of self-degradation—and possible salvation—in which he blinds himself, puts shards of glass in his shoes, and wraps barbed wire around his torso. The Violent Bear It Away ( 1960 ) is a dark tale of fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater, who has been raised to be a prophet by his great-uncle, the self-declared backwoods prophet Mason Tarwater. When Mason dies, Francis moves to the city to find his secular uncle Rayber and his mentally deficient son Bishop. Francis was brought up believing his mission was to baptize Bishop. In the ensuing struggle, O’Connor exposes both religious fundamentalism and a world based on supercilious facts as inherently faulty.

Like O’Connor, the stories and novels of Carson McCullers (born Lula Carson Smith , 1917–1967 ) are steeped in the grotesque. An abundance of “freaks” fill the pages: dwarfs, giants, cross-dressers, homosexuals, and deaf-mutes. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ( 1940 ), the life of adolescent tomboy Mick clashes with the deaf-mute John Singer, an isolated and alienated misfit, whom the other characters nonetheless confide in, perhaps—as Melissa Free notes—because “he recognizes and affirms their own differences, which they feel but cannot name as queer.” 68 Much like McCullers herself, Mick rejects established gender roles, and her rejection makes her an outsider in the small, isolated Georgia town and propels the narrative toward themes of sex, gender fluidity, and alienation. The Ballad of the Sad Café ( 1951 ), also set in an isolated Georgia community, features the hunchback Lymon, who shows up on Miss Amelia’s doorstep, claiming to be her cousin. Amid the community’s increasing rumors of scandal, Miss Amelia settles down with Lymon and opens a café. But the return of her ex-husband brings violence and eventual isolation and alienation. Both novels are also grotesque in the way the so-called outsiders demand readers’ sympathy, and McCullers points to the failures at the heart of the society that seeks to repress its Others. This is also the case in McCullers’ other novels, such as The Member of the Wedding ( 1946 ) and Clock Without Hands ( 1961 ).

American theater of the 1940s and 1950s was infused with a heavy dose of Southern Gothic sensibility thanks to the plays of Tennessee Williams ( 1911–1983 ). Characters with varying degrees of illness populate his works, and his own sexual orientation, socially unacceptable at the time, found its way into plays such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ( 1955 ), in which Brick, who is gay, struggles with his unhappy marriage and with his dying but domineering father, Big Daddy. In other plays, such as The Glass Menagerie ( 1944 ), A Streetcar Named Desire ( 1947 ), and Sweet Bird of Youth ( 1959 ), Williams created Gothic spaces of boundary crossings as well as other familiar tropes of the Southern Gothic, such as disintegrating southern families, alienation, loneliness, alcoholism, and physical and psychological violence. Rather than a mere freakshow, Williams uses the characters in his plays to question the notion of normalcy and to explore the discrepancies between private and public selves. His plays, as Stephen Matterson argues, point to the performative aspects of all our lives, but perhaps especially those lived in the South, a region that in Williams’s plays is presented as an incongruous site of Romantic myth and urban, modern reality. 69 The struggle of his characters to come to terms with the discrepancy comes off as essentially heroic, embodied best, perhaps, in Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire ( 1947 ): the southern belle trapped in the modern world.

While he worked in many genres, Truman Capote ( 1924–1984 ) is often placed in the school of Southern Gothic writers. Other Voices, Other Rooms ( 1948 ) relies on obvious elements of Southern Gothic, from its secluded, decaying mansion at Skull’s Landing to scenes of pedophilia and violence, as well as characters drawn from the grotesque vein of Southern Gothic: a crossdresser, a mute quadriplegic, and a dwarf. Capote’s childhood friend Harper Lee ( 1926–2016 ) wrote perhaps the most widely read and most-loved Southern Gothic of the 20th century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird ( 1960 ) is told by the tomboy Scout and draws on Gothic traits to examine boundaries of race, class, and gender in the 1930s South. Gothic elements include the children’s fear of the mysterious neighbor Boo Radley, as well as a rabid dog, and a Halloween night in which fear of the supernatural pales in the face of the violent, alcoholic, and racist Bob Ewell, who attacks Scout and her brother Jem with a knife.

Southern Gothic and African Americans

African Americans have long had their own unique perspective on Southern Gothic and the repressed racial tensions at the heart of the genre. In Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), Toni Morrison examines the ways in which early white writers of the American Gothic used the black slave body as a site onto which was projected the various shortcomings, failures, and repressed desires of the white American psyche. This resulted in the construction of what Morrison calls “an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.” 70 In other words, blacks became monstrous Others who haunted the Southern Gothic and American culture at large. It is this otherness that African American writers have challenged. Richard Wright eerily sums up the very real Gothic aura of the African American experience in 12 Million Black Voices ( 1941 ): “We black men and women in America today, as we look back upon scenes of rapine, sacrifice, and death, seem to be children of a devilish aberration, descendants of an interval of nightmare in history, fledglings of a period of amnesia on the part of men who once dreamed a great dream and forgot.” 71 Certainly, if Southern Gothic, as Maisha Wester contends, “can be understood as a genre that is aware of the impossibility of escaping racial haunting,” 72 then slave narratives, such as Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains ( 1859 ), William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom ( 1860 ), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( 1861 ) in essence initiated a unique and often overlooked African American variation on the Southern Gothic.

Modern African American writers also adopted the Gothic conventions, in the process exchanging the genre’s more supernatural aspects with more realistic features “founded on actual lives often lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying.” 73 The starkest example of this is Richard Wright, whose texts confront the horrors of white racism head-on with an unflinching eye. Wright’s work marks a reversal of Gothic tropes, one in which whiteness takes on uncanny and horrific hues. In his essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Wright describes lying in bed as a young boy, delirious, and fearful of the “monstrous white faces … leering” at him above his bed. 74

The notion of “double consciousness” presented by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk ( 1903 ) runs through much of African American Gothic. An early example of this is Jean Toomer’s Cane ( 1923 ), in which the theme of miscegenation and the figure of the mulatto take on Gothic hues. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ( 1952 ) opens with a nod to both Du Bois and the Gothic: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe … When [people] approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” 75 The novel moves from the small-town South to New York, but in each location the horrors and monsters inherent in the Gothic turn out to be too real and too human for the novel’s black protagonist, who feels increasingly entrapped and imprisoned. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937 ) stays on southern ground, in Florida, and is ripe with Gothic scenes and imagery: Janie, the protagonist, is forced to shoot and kill her rabies-infected husband after he tries to shoot her. And the hurricane that sweeps over the Everglades and turns Lake Okeechobee into a “monstropolous beast” 76 is a recurrent Gothic trope. The African American version of (Southern) Gothic has found its zenith in Toni Morrison. While not a southerner, Morrison still employs Southern Gothic in her seminal novel Beloved ( 1987 ), a text that takes place mostly in Ohio but is haunted by traumatic events that occurred in the South. Beloved is a novel ripe for “sophisticated psychoanalytical and postmodernist or poststructuralist readings which focus on the treatment of fragmented subjectivities and how language strains to record (and is perhaps incapable) of documenting the horrors at the heart of the [Gothic] novel.” 77 Continuing in the vein of Morrison, in A Visitation of Spirits ( 1989 ) Randall Kenan’s strategy is to treat as uncanny not the ghosts from the past and all the repressed markers of racism and slavery that they bring to the surface but rather the white institutions that constructed blacks as others. 78

Contemporary Southern Gothic

Cormac McCarthy is arguably the most critically acclaimed contemporary practitioner of the Southern Gothic. McCarthy began his literary career with four dark and deeply violent novels set in Appalachian Tennessee: The Orchard Keeper ( 1965 ), Outer Dark ( 1968 ), Child of God ( 1973 ), and Suttree ( 1979 ). All four novels owe a debt to the tradition of the Southern Gothic especially that of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But Robert Brinkmeyer also sees McCarthy’s “gothic imagination” as “haunted by a frightening vision of destruction and waste” that is “simultaneously pre- and post-human.” 79 At the same time, as Lydia Cooper asserts, McCarthy’s “horror-drenched and heavily allegorical aesthetic style” is combined “with historically rooted commentary on social ills, such as issues of race, class, urbanization, and industrialization, to bring into focus repressed social anxieties.” 80 Child of God shows perhaps the strongest influence of O’Connor’s grotesque take on the Southern Gothic. The necrophiliac mass-murderer Lester Ballard is “an extreme contemporary rendering of the gothic villain.” 81 The story follows Ballard’s exiled subterranean existence and his downward spiral into murderer and necrophiliac and finally to a primal, animal-like state. McCarthy’s initial description of Ballard as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps” 82 invites an unnerving sense of identification with this “reduced, grotesque, and monstrous aberration of humanity.” 83

After decades of western-themed novels, McCarthy returned to the Southern Gothic with The Road ( 2006 ). The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a post-apocalyptic story set in an unspecified southern location. A father and his son traverse a barren wasteland of corpses and marauding bands of cannibals to reach the ocean. Both shockingly violent and contemplative, Jay Ellis reads The Road as “haunted both by Old Southern slavery guilt, and by anxiety over New Southern consumption.” 84

Cormac McCarthy has been linked to a so-called Rough South tradition, also referred to as “Grit Lit.” The writers placed under these headings all borrow various elements of Southern Gothic to support their bleak portrayals of the American South in which violence plays a crucial part. While the group of writers is predominantly white and male, a few women like Dorothy Allison have also been placed in the Rough South category. Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina ( 1992 ) certainly draws on Gothic elements to expose the ways in which patriarchy has repressed women’s voices that challenged the mythic southern narrative. In many of the stories and novels by male Rough South writers, such as Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay, Tom Franklin, and Ron Rash, the antagonists are violent men of seemingly pure evil, men driven by incredible bloodthirst who will stop at nothing to satisfy their deadly desires. Invoking the Gothic tradition, these villains may take on the shape of ghosts, witches, or living dead, as in Gay’s The Long Home ( 1999 ) or Rash’s One Foot in Eden ( 2002 ), but apart from the obvious sensationalism provided by these killers, the writers use the villains symbolically in order to point out inherent problems in today’s (post-)South. Hannah’s Yonder Stands Your Orphan ( 2001 ) takes place in the contemporary Mississippi Delta, which is depicted as a rotten and degenerate place, a landscape in physical and moral decay, where casino musicians, “although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs,” 85 and where zombies wait behind the counters of the countless pawnshops, “quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond.” 86 In this rotten South, the land is also a catalogue of past horrors. The Confederate and Union dead resting in the ground have been joined by other victims of horrible crimes:

Scores of corpses rested below the lakes, oxbows, river ways and bayous of these parts, not counting the skeletons of Grant’s infantry. The country was built to hide those dead by foul deed, it sucked at them. Back to the flood of 1927 , lynchings, gun and knife duels were common stories here. Muddy water made a fine lost tomb. 87

The resurfacing of two dead bodies buried in the bayou unleashes a violent rampage perpetrated by the novel’s villain. In true Gothic fashion, the return of the repressed past brings forth guilt, responsibility, and a grotesque display of violence. 88

Hannah’s zombies are part of a larger tradition in Southern Gothic. As the editors of Undead Souths point out, the South has been—and continues to be—home to a “pervading presence of diverse forms of undeadness—racial, ethnic, political, economic, historical.” 89 Using Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead ( 2003 –) as an endpoint, Jay Ellis traces the “zombie narrative” of southern culture from its beginnings in 1929 and sees it as “a reemergent memory of slavery” and an “expression of wider xenophobic fears of the other” as well as an expression of gender fears. 90 But he also points to zombies as “global citizens,” made southern by way of Haiti, of slavery and Jim Crow laws, 91 thereby making the zombie a prominent figure in New Southern studies.

The Southern Gothic remains undead, its territory broader and more inclusive than ever before. While few southern writers are content to work solely in the Southern Gothic vein, many nonetheless tap into the sharp divisions that make up their region, the beautiful pastoral Arcadia and the grotesque deformities that rise to the surface both literally and figuratively. The attempt to come to terms with this chasm—or to expose its cracks and fissures—remains a potent and relevant vehicle driving a substantial body of southern literature today.

Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on the Southern Gothic has seen a dramatic rise in the 21st century, both in volume, scope, and acceptance. Yet there is still a sparsity of monographs covering the full spectrum of Southern Gothic. Instead, various chapters and articles about specific writers of Southern Gothic are spread out over monographs and anthologies dedicated to American literature, Gothic literature, American Gothic literature, Southern literature, or specific southern writers. Therefore, the history of Southern Gothic scholarship begins with more general works and slowly becomes more specific.

Leslie Fiedler is widely recognized as “the first critic to discuss the American gothic’s peculiarity and to recognize its social impulse.” 92 He did so in his influential Love and Death in the American Novel ( 1960 ), where he acknowledged that the Gothic has “continued to seem vulgar and contrived” but argues that “it is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers.” 93 American fiction, he insists, is “a gothic fiction … a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.” 94 Among the southern writers discussed at length by Fiedler are Simms, Poe, and Faulkner, and Fiedler ends his study by pointing to Elizabeth Spencer, Flannery O’Connor, and “such talented female fictionists as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers” as writers who expand Faulkner’s “vision of the South as a world of gothic terror disguised as historical fact” into a “living tradition.” 95 While Fiedler paved the way for a scholarly interest in the Gothic, that interest was made possible by a “renewed interest in psychoanalysis and Marxism, theoretical modes that have since been used extensively and effectively in interpretations of the Gothic in many forms.” 96 Thus, Irving Malin’s New American Gothic ( 1962 ) examined contemporary writers, including such central figures of the Southern Gothic as Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers.

The renewed academic interest in the American Gothic spilled over into southern studies and led to monographs focusing on Gothic elements in specific southern writers. But scholars still struggled with the legitimacy of the genre. So while G. R. Thompson in Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales ( 1973 ) sets out to rehabilitate Poe “by equally New Critical and History of Ideas standards,” ultimately, he asserts, “the Gothic is a set of devalued ingredients, not really essential to American writing at Poe’s time.” 97 And Elizabeth M. Kerr, who relies heavily on Fiedler’s work in her William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain ( 1979 ), begins her study by almost apologizing for writing on a topic “scorned by critics as subliterary, sentimental ‘formula’ fiction” that has “pejorative connotations.” 98 However, concurrently with literature’s turn toward postmodernism and, increasingly, poststructuralism, Southern Gothic became increasingly fertile ground for scholars imbued with theoretical tools from Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others. Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 ( 2000 ) is a prime example of this new movement, as is Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South ( 2003 ). Both monographs, while not specific studies of the Southern Gothic, nevertheless focus on the instability of some of the central categories that have been used to build narratives and counter-narratives of the South: race and gender. And they draw on postmodern and poststructuralist theory to revisit and, indeed, reconstruct given assumptions about the South and canonical works of southern literature.

Fiedler pointed to the link between the Gothic and America’s troubled racial history, and in The Heroic Ideal in American Literature ( 1971 ), Theodore L. Gross argued that modern African American writers used elements of Southern Gothic in more realistic ways to point to the horrors of racism. Maisha L. Wester and other 21st-century scholars have examined slave narratives as the inception of African American Gothic and shown how, to late 20th-century African American writers, the Gothic is “a tool capable of expressing the complexity of black experience in America.” 99 Wester is but one of many contemporary scholars who are re-examining and re-evaluating aspects of Southern Gothic in canonical writers, but also drastically expanding the canon in ways that correlate with the so-called New Southern studies. Houston Baker and Dana Nelson defined New Southern studies as a school that “welcomes the complication of old borders and terrains, wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South.’” 100 As the title of the anthology Look Away: The US South in New World Studies suggests, the editors envision a “liminal south, one that troubles essentialist narratives both of global-southern decline and of global-northern national or regional unity, of American or Southern exceptionalism.” 101

Scholars working in this vein have embraced a postcolonial and transnational approach in the rethinking of the South and its literature. In fact, the 21st century has been a tumultuous era of change and re-examination within southern studies. Traditional and monolithic themes such as race, place, and past are being re-examined, challenged, revised, and injected with newer approaches and topics such as trauma theory and queer studies. This has opened up previously overlooked, repressed, and neglected spaces, peoples, and subjects, so that today, scholars are exploring the presence or absence of Southern Gothic’s relation to indigenous groups, queers, the Caribbean and Latin America, and vampires, to name a few. Southern Gothic Literature ( 2013 ), edited by Jay Ellis, includes a chapter on “Southern Gothic poetry,” a genre much overlooked in traditional studies of the Southern Gothic. But where Ellis’s anthology focuses on well-established writers, Toni Morrison being the newest, a good example of the sprawling richness of current scholarship in the Southern Gothic is presented in the anthology Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture ( 2015 ). Among the many topics covered are “Haitian zombie mythology in Herman Melville’s depiction of chattel and wage slaveries” as well as “diasporic transplantations in the surreal fiction of the Irish-born, Trinidadian author Shani Mootoo.” 102 As these examples make clear, and as the editors of Undead Souths note, the most recent scholarship on the Southern Gothic is a far cry from “the now-threadbare tropes of ‘ the Southern Gothic’—singular and capitalized—as if both the region (‘Southern’) and the genre (‘Gothic’) are readily identifiable, monolithic entities.” 103 And judging from the recent outpour of scholarship and academic conferences dedicated to the Southern Gothic, the discussion about this particular genre does not seem to be waning anytime soon.

Further Reading

• Anderson, Eric Gary , Taylor Hagood , and Daniel Cross Turner , eds. Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015.
• Castillo Street, Susan , and Charles L. Crow , eds. The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic . New York: Palgrave, 2016.
• Crow, Charles L. History of the Gothic: American Gothic . Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.
• Crow, Charles L. A Companion to American Gothic . Edited by Charles L. Crow . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Ellis, Jay , ed. Critical Insights: Southern Gothic Literature . Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013.
• Fiedler, Leslie . Love and Death in the American Novel . 1960; repr. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997.
• Frank, Frederick S. Through the Pale Door: A Guide to and through the American Gothic . New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
• Frye, Steven . Understanding Cormac McCarthy . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
• Goddu, Teresa . Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation . New York: Columbia University Pres, 1997.
• Gray, Richard . Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
• Hogle, Jerrold E. , ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Kerr, Elizabeth M. William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain . Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979.
• Lloyd-Smith, Allan . “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic . Edited by David Punter , 163–175. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• Lloyd-Smith, Alan . American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction . New York: Continuum, 2004.
• Martin, Robert K. , and Eric Savoy , eds. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.
• Wester, Maisha L. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• Weston, Ruth D. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

1. H. L. Malchow , Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 4.

2. David Punter , The Literature of Terror: Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition , 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996).

3. Alan Lloyd-Smith , American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), 1.

4. Jerrold E. Hogle “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction , ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.

5. Eric Savoy , “The Rise of the American Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction , ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174.

6. Leslie Fiedler , Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 135.

7. Teresa Goddu , Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3.

8. Allan Lloyd-Smith , “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic,” in A New Companion to the Gothic , ed. David Punter (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 163.

9. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy , “Introduction,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative , ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), vii.

10. Savoy, “The Rise,” 167.

11. Allison Graham , “The South in Popular Culture,” in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South , ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 349.

12. Flannery O’Connor , “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose , ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 28.

13. Benjamin F. Fisher IV , “Southern Gothic,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture , vol. 9: Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 145.

14. Charles Reagan Wilson , “Myth, Manners, and Memory,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 4: Myth, Manners, and Memory , ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1.

15. William Faulkner , As I Lay Dying (1930; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 45.

16. Tennessee Williams , Where I Live: Selected Essays , ed. Christine R. Day and Bob Woods (New York: New Directions, 1978), 42.

17. William Moss , “Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention,” in A Companion to American Gothic , ed. Charles L. Crow (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 179.

18. Charles L. Crow , History of the Gothic: American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 124.

19. Ibid. , 134.

20. Fiedler, Love , 397.

21. Crow, History of the Gothic , 129.

22. Bridget M. Marshall , “Defining Southern Gothic,” in Critical Insights: Southern Gothic Literature , ed. Jay Ellis (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), 13.

23. Crow, History of the Gothic , 129.

24. Mikhail Bakhtin , Rabelais and His World (1968; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

25. Melissa Free , “Relegation and Rebellion: The Queer, the Grotesque, and the Silent in the Fiction of Carson McCullers,” Studies in the Novel 40.4 (Winter 2008): 429.

26. Flannery O’Connor , “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose , ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (1969; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 40–43.

27. Fisher IV, “Southern Gothic,” 148

28. Castillo Street and Crow, “Introduction,” 3.

29. Edgar Allan Poe , “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings , ed. David Galloway (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 138.

30. Moss, “Fall of the House,” 179.

31. Savoy, “The Rise,” 182.

32. Christopher J. Walsh , “‘Dark Legacy’: Gothic Ruptures in Southern Literature,” in Critical Insights: Southern Gothic Literature , ed. Jay Ellis (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), 25.

33. Edgar Allan Poe , “The Black Cat,” in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings , ed. David Galloway (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 322.

34. Ibid. , 329.

35. Lesley Ginsberg , “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative , ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99.

36. Frederick S. Frank , Through the Pale Door: A Guide to and through the American Gothic (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), x.

37. Ellen Glasgow , “Heroes and Monsters,” The Saturday Review , May 4, 1953, 3.

39. Gerald Johnson , “The Horrible South,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 11.2 (April 1935): 44.

40. Isaac Rosenfeld , “To Win by Default,” New Republic , July 7, 1952, 19.

41. Williams, Where I Live , 41–42, 42.

42. Richard Gray , Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 160, 161.

43. Michael Kreyling , Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 78.

44. William Faulkner , Requiem for a Nun (1951; repr., New York: Vintage, 2011), 73.

45. Fred Botting , Gothic (London: Routledge, 1995), 9.

46. William Faulkner , “A Rose for Emily,” Collected Stories (1950; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1995), 130.

48. Richard Gray , “Inside the Dark House: William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and Southern Gothic,” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic , ed. Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 23.

49. Crow, History of the Gothic , 124.

50. Ibid. , 126.

51. Fisher IV, “Southern Gothic,” 149.

52. David R. Jarraway , “The Gothic Import of Faulkner’s ‘Black Son’ in Light in August ,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative , ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 57.

53. Gray, “Inside the Dark House,” 21, 22.

54. William Faulkner , Absalom, Absalom! (1936; repr., London: Vintage, 1995), 169.

55. Lynn Gartrell Levins , Faulkner’s Heroic Design: The Yoknapatawpha Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 7–8.

56. Ruth D. Weston , Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 1–2.

57. Ibid. , 3.

58. Suzanne V. Donaldson , “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic,” Mississippi Quarterly 50.4 (Fall 1997): 583.

59. Chad Rohman , “Awful Mystery: Flannery O’Connor as Gothic Artist,” in A Companion to American Gothic , ed. Charles L. Crow (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 280.

60. Susan Castillo , “Flannery O’Connor,” in A Companion to The Literature and Culture of the American South , ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 488.

61. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 40.

62. Ibid. , 41, 43.

63. Flannery O’Connor , “Good Country People,” in The Complete Stories (1971; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 276, 282, 291.

64. Flannery O’Connor , “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in The Complete Stories (1971; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 133.

65. Flannery O’Connor , “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose , ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (1969; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 118.

66. O’Connor, “Good Country People,” 291.

67. O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 132.

68. Free, “Relegation and Rebellion,” 426.

69. Stephen Matterson , “‘The Room Must Evoke Some Ghosts’: Tennessee Williams,” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic , ed. Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 382–383.

70. Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 38.

71. Richard Wright , 12 Million Black Voices (1941; repr., New York: Basic Books, 2008), 35.

72. Maisha L. Wester , African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 25.

73. Theodore L. Gross , The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (New York: Free Press, 1971), 184.

74. Richard Wright , “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in Uncle Tom’s Children (1940; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 3.

75. Ralph Ellison , Invisible Man (1952; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 3.

76. Zora Neale Hurston , Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; repr., New York: Perennial Classics, 1997), 161.

77. Walsh, “Dark Legacy,” 23.

78. Wester, African American Gothic , 29.

79. Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. , “A Long View of History: Cormac McCarthy’s Gothic Vision,” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic , ed. Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 175.

80. Lydia R. Cooper , “McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy , ed. Steven Frye (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41.

81. Frye, Understanding , 44.

82. Cormac McCarthy , Child of God (1973; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1993), 4.

83. Frye, Understanding , 39

84. Jay Ellis , “ The Road beyond Zombies of the New South,” in Critical Insights: Southern Gothic Literature , ed. Jay Ellis (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), 50.

85. Barry Hannah , Yonder Stands Your Orphan (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 37–38.

86. Ibid. , 175.

87. Ibid. , 20–21.

88. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre , “Southern Evil, Southern Violence: Gothic Residues in the Works of William Gay, Barry Hannah, and Cormac McCarthy,” in The Scourges of the South: Essays on the Sickly South in History, Literature, and Popular Culture , ed. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre and Beata Zawadka (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 84.

89. Eric Gary Anderson et al., “Introduction,” Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 1.

90. Jay Ellis , “On Southern Gothic Literature,” in Critical Insights: Southern Gothic Literature , ed. Jay Ellis (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013), xxi.

91. Ibid. , xviii.

92. Goddu, Gothic America , 9.

93. Fiedler, Love , 28.

94. Ibid. , 29.

95. Ibid. , 475.

96. Jerrold E. Hogle , “The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic,” in A Companion to American Gothic , ed. Charles L. Crow (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 5.

98. Kerr, William Faulkner’s , 3.

99. Wester, African American Gothic , 257.

100. Houston Baker and Dana Nelson , “Preface: Violence, The Body, and ‘The South,’” American Literature 73.2 (June 2001): 243.

101. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn , “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities,” Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies , ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 13.

102. Anderson et al., “Introduction,” 2.

103. Ibid. , 7.

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The Essays, Sketches and Lectures of Edgar Allan Poe

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Sections:   The Collections and Books    The Essays, etc.    Related Material    Bibliography

The Collections and Books:

Editions Authorized by Poe:

Poe published only one of his lectures during his life. This was “The Universe,” published as Eureka , the “Prose Poem” by which he hoped most ernestly to be remembered. Other items were first collected in the posthumous collection edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, incorporating some additional manuscript changes and other material. These collections are listed chronologically.

• Eureka: A Prose Poem   (1848 — EUREKA — there are several copies with annotations by Poe)
• The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold   (1850, volume II: Poems and Miscellanies ; and 1856, volume IV: Pym, &c .  — WORKS )

Later Collected Editions:

After Griswold's death in 1857, there were several alternate attempts to collect Poe's works, including a number of the essays and Eureka . The most important of these were collections edited by John H. Ingram, also in four volumes (initially published in 1874-1875), the ten-volume set edited by Edmund C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry (initially published in 1894-1895), and the seventeen-volume set edited by James A. Harrison (published in 1902). (Although at least one of these editions bears the title of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , none of them are, in fact, actually complete. In some instances, they also contain works that have since been identified as not being by Poe.)

• The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by John H. Ingram   (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1874-1875 — The essays are collected in volume 3)
• The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Edmund C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry   (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894-1895 — The essays are collected in volume 7 and Eureka will be found in volume 9)
• The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by James A. Harrison   (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1902 — The essays are collected in volume 14 and Eureka will be found in volume 16)

Modern Scholarly Editions:

The most widely recognized scholarly edition of Poe's tales and sketches, also including some of the essays, are the volumes edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, (published in 1978, nearly a decade after Mabbott's death), completed by his widow, Maureen Cobb Mabbott (and several assistants), with a few additional essays appearing in the volumes in the edition as continued by Burton R. Pollin. All of these volumes are thoroughly annotated, with introductory material, notes and variants. Two volumes originally prepared for this series, edited by Stuart and Susan Levine, were published separately by the University of Illinois Press.

• The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott   (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978 — Volume 2: Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842 and Volume 3: Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849 )
• The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Burton R. Pollin   (New York: Gordian Press, 1986 and 1997 — Volume 3: Writings in the Broadway Journal, Text , Volume 4: Writings in the Broadway Journal, Annotations , and Volume 35 Writings in the Southern Literary Messenger, Text and Annotations
• Eureka and Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , edited by Stuart and Susan F. Levine   (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004 and 2009)

The Essays, Sketches and Lectures:

These items are arranged alphabetically by name. Within each name, entries are listed chronologically. Some of these items were not published under any specific title and most are, therefore, given here under a title deemed appropriately descriptive. The authorship of some items is a topic long researched and debated. Most of the items included here were signed, but for some, the attribution to Poe is necessarily the result of conjecture. A few prominent items that have been rejected are also listed, including a number of poems that were erroneously ascribed to Poe by T. O. Mabbott.

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   A    B    C    D   E    F    G   H    I    J   K   L    M    N    O   P    Q   R    S    T   U   V   W   X   Y   Z  

• “ American Novel-Writing ”
• “ American Poetry ”
• “ American Poetry ”   (a lecture)
• “ Anastatic Printing ”
• “ Byron and Miss Chaworth ”
• “ The Capitol at Washington ”   (rejected)
• “ A Chapter in the History of Vivum-Ovo ”   (rejected)
• “ Cryptography ” (alternate title for “Secret Writing”)
• “ The Elk ”   (later title of “Morning on the Wissahiccon”)
• “ English Notes for Extensive Circulation ”   (rejected)
• “ Eureka ”
• “ Exordium [to Critical Notices] ”
• “ A Few Words on Etiquette ”   (rejected)
• “ Harpers Ferry ”   (rejected)
• “ House Furniture ” (alternate title for “The Philosophy of Furniture”)
• “ Instinct Versus Reason — A Black Cat ”
• “ Letter to B—— ”
• “ Maelzel's Chess-Player ”
• “ Magazine Writing — Peter Snook ” (alternate title of a review of “Peter Snook,” by James Dalton
• “ Morning on the Wissahiccon ”   (original title of “The Elk”)
• “ Notes Upon English Verse ”   (original title for “The Rationale of Verse”)
• “ An Opinion on Dreams ”    (rejected)
• “ Our Magazine Literature ”    (Possibly by Poe, but disputed)
• “ Old English Poetry ”    (Actually a later title assigned to Poe's review of Book of Gems by Samuel Carter Hall)
• “ Palaestine ”
• “ The Pay for American Authors ”
• The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism   (rejected)
• “ The Philosophy of Composition ”
• “ The Philosophy of Furniture ”
• “ The Poetic Principle ”
• “ Poets and Poetry of America ”   (a lecture, also called “American Poetry”)
• “ The Rationale of Verse ”
• “ Secret Writing ”
• “ Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House ”
• “ Some Account of Stonehenge ”
• “ Street-Paving ”

Related Material:

• A chronological index   (in preparation)
• “ The Canon of Poe's Essays, Sketches & Lectures

Bibliography:

• Brigham, Clarence S., Edgar Allan Poe's Contributions to Alexander's Weekly Messenger , Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society , April 1943. (Also reprinted separately.)
• Edsall, Thomas, ed., The Poe Catalogue , Baltimore: The 19th Century Shop, 1992. (This catalogue includes a few reprints of material which are not noted elsewhere.)
• Harrison, James A[lbert]., ed, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , 17 vols, New York: T. Crowell, 1902.
• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bilbiography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943. (The best overall bibliography of Poe, although it does contain errors and is somewhat outdated.)
• Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Eureka , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004  (Poe's text, edited and with an introduction, notes and textual variants)
• Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009 (Poe's texts, edited and with introductory material, notes and textual variants)
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe ; (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches ), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. (Second printing 1979)
• Pollin, Burton R., ed., The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe ; Vols. III & IV - The Broadway Journal: Non-Fictional Prose , New York: Gordian Press, 1986; Vol. V - The Southern Literary Messenger: Non-Fictional Prose , New York: Gordian Press, 1997.
• Thompson, G. Richard, ed. , Essays and Reviews , New York: The Library of America, 1984. (A good basic collection.)
• Vines, Lois D., ed., Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities , Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. (An extremely useful compendium of articles by various authors, divided by country or region.)
• Woodberry, George E[dward]. and Stedman, Edmund Clarence, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , 10 vols, Chicago, 1894-1895. (Reprinted in 1903 and 1914.)

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Hook examples for edgar allan poe essays, anecdotal hook.

Imagine a dimly lit room, a chilling silence broken only by the rustling of pages. As you delve into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, you step into a realm of mystery and macabre.

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What drives a writer to explore the darkest corners of the human psyche and create tales that haunt readers for generations? Edgar Allan Poe's works pose this intriguing question.

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"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." — Edgar Allan Poe. Explore the profound and often enigmatic thoughts of Poe through his poetic and literary creations.

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Edgar Allan Poe, born in 1809, is known for his pioneering contributions to the genres of Gothic fiction and detective fiction. His impact on literature is immeasurable.

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What defines a master of the macabre? Edgar Allan Poe's writings epitomize the genre of Gothic literature, characterized by eerie atmospheres and psychological depth.

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Transport yourself to the 19th century, a time when literature was redefined by Poe's tales of mystery and suspense. Explore the cultural context of his era.

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Contrast the dark and tumultuous life of Edgar Allan Poe with the enduring legacy of his literary works. His troubled existence adds a layer of complexity to his writings.

Narrative Hook

Enter the shadowy world of Edgar Allan Poe's narrators, where the line between reality and delusion blurs. His stories are immersive journeys into the human psyche.

Shocking Statement Hook

Prepare to be shocked by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, where premature burials, vengeful murders, and other horrors await. His stories push the boundaries of fear and fascination.

Characterization in The Tell Tale Heart

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How Does Montresor Kill Fortunato

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The Fall of The House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The Feeling of Scare

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Edgar Allan Poe: Influence in Horror and Poetry Itself

A linguistic analysis of edgar allan poe’s 'to helen', analysis of styles and themes in the writings of edgar allan poe, the themes of obsession, isolation, and madness in edgar allan poe’s stories, the influence of edgar allan poe’s life traumas on his writing, depiction of the women in transit in edgar allan poe's short stories, the theme of death in edgar allan poe’s the masque of the red death, comprehensive analysis of the black cat by edgar allan poe, review of "the tell-tale heart" short story by edgar allan poe, edgar allan poe’s use of literary techniques in the tell-tale heart, depiction of madness in "berenice" and "the tell-tale heart" by edgar allen poe, the unjustified motive for murder in "the cask of amontillado", discovering ligeia: immortality, transcendentalism and the search for the unknown, the themes of human weakness and imperfections in the masque of the red death, the tell-tale heart: the influence of poe’s childhood on his writing, symbolism in poe and hawthorne's works, mankind's dualistic nature in the masque of the red death, representation of romanticism in edgar allen poe’s poetry, murder and mental breakdown in "the tell-tale heart" and the picture of dorian gray, analysis of edgar allan poe's a dream within a dream.

January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

October 7, 1849, Church Home & Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Writer, Poet, Editor, Literary Critic

• The Fall of the House of Ushe
• The Purloined Letter
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Black Cat
• The Cask of Amontillado
• MS. Found in a Bottle
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• Tamerlane, and Other Poems
• "Quoth the raven, "Nevermore!""
• "We loved with a love that was more than love."
• "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849

Edgar Allan Poe 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.

Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known works include the poems “To Helen” (1831), “The Raven” (1845), and “Annabel Lee” (1849); the short stories of wickedness and crime “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846); and the supernatural horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer of primarily poetry and short stories that explored themes of death, regret, and lost love.

Edgar Allan Poe is credited with initiating the modern detective story, developing the Gothic horror story, and being a significant early forerunner of the science fiction form. Poe’s literary criticism, which put great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure and the importance of achieving a unity of mood or effect, shaped literary theory.

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

Relevant topics

• William Shakespeare
• Benjamin Banneker
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Langston Hughes
• The Tempest
• Amelia Earhart
• Maya Angelou
• Alice Walker
• William Blake

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The Black Cat

27 pages • 54 minutes read

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Essay Topics

Construct an argument about the narrator’s mental state throughout the story. How does he rationalize his actions? What role does alcohol addiction play?

Discuss the narrator’s murder of his wife and his motivation beyond the immediate catalyst. Why does he react so violently? What else has his wife done in this tale?

What is the narrator’s attitude toward humanity, and how does it determine his actions in this tale?

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Related Titles

By Edgar Allan Poe

A Dream Within a Dream

Edgar Allan Poe

Annabel Lee

The Cask of Amontillado

The Conqueror Worm

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Gold Bug

The Haunted Palace

The Imp of the Perverse

The Man of the Crowd

The Masque of the Red Death

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Oval Portrait

The Philosophy of Composition

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Research Topics About Edgar Allan Poe

• Essay Topics

• What Impact Did Edgar Allan Poe Have on Literature?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Maintain Suspense for the Reader?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe’s Story the Black Cat Mislead the Reader?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Dreams to Depict Terror and Reflect the Narrator’s Perception of Reality?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Generate Fear in The Pit and the Pendulum?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Characterize American Literature?
• In What Ways Does Edgar Allan Poe’s Work Explore Parallels between Love and Hatred?
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe and Jack London Handle the Subject of Death in Their Short Stories?
• How Do Edgar Allan Poe’s Predecessors Influence His Work?
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings Illuminate His Childhood.
• Was Edgar Allan Poe Jingle man?
• What Influenced Edgar Allan Poe’s Style of Writing?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe So Outstanding?
• Who Exactly Was Edgar Allan Poe?
• Who Was William Wilson in Edgar Allan Poe’s Works?
• Why does Edgar Allan Poe prefer horror and death to other literary genres?
• Edgar Allan Poe: Drunken Madman or Brilliant Author?
• Edgar Allan Poe: Strange Dreamer or True Genius?
• What Were the Final Five Words of Edgar Allan Poe?
• What Is Edgar Allan Poe Most Widely Known for?
• What Condition Does Edgar Allan Poe Have?
• Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write on the Subject of Death?
• What Are Five Interesting Edgar Allan Poe Facts?
• Why did Edgar Allan Poe Marry His Cousin, Who Was 13 Years Old?
• Did Edgar Allan Poe Have a Cat on His Shoulder While He Wrote?
• Which Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Well-Known Poem?
• What Does Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven Mean?
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Use Language to Create Atmosphere and Suspense?

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