Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased… Read More ›
Search results for ‘Edgar Allan Poe’
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter
One of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “tales of ratiocination” whose emphasis on deductive reasoning became the basis for the modern detective story, The Purloined Letter features Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the archetype of the modern fictional detective who always outwits… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum
“The Pit and the Pendulum” first appeared in Edgar Allan Poe’s collection of short stories The Gift in 1843. The story is a terrifying tale of suspense in which Poe captures the horrors of confinement and torture. The main character,… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an extension of his gothic tales as well as the first detective fiction, although the word detective had not been coined yet. This story, along with “The Mystery of Marie… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Long considered Edgar Allan Poe‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The seriocomic tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” first appeared in American Review in December 1845 as “The Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case.” The revised tale was reprinted with an introductory note by Poe that noted the… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories
During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug. The Raven, his most… Read More ›
Analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Lawyer’s Story of a Stolen Letter
“The Stolen Letter” was originally published as “The Fourth Poor Traveller” in The Seven Poor Travellers, the extra Christmas number of Charles Dickens’s Household Words (December 1854). At this time, Wilkie Collins was a protégé of Dickens. The story was… Read More ›
Analysis of Graham Greene’s A Little Place off the Edgware Road
This story was first published in Graham Greene’s debut volume of short stories, The Basement Room (1935). The piece emerged again in 1947 in Nineteen Stories and then again in 1954 in Twenty-One Stories. The Basement Room received a cool… Read More ›
Analysis of Bram Stoker’s The Dualitists
First published in the Theatre Annual (1887), “The Dualitists,” frequently cited as demonstrating one of Bram Stoker’s favorite themes, male bonding, evokes a world of children’s adventure stories. As in much of Stoker’s fiction, the driving force grows out of… Read More ›
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th-century literary, artistic, and cultural movement influenced by the aesthetic philosophies of the German romantic school, by the art criticism of John Ruskin, and by French writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. Aspects of aestheticism… Read More ›
Pre-Raphaelitism
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of authors in the later 1840s through the close of the 1890s who espoused a distinctive artistic philosophy. In form, Pre-Raphaelite short stories exhibit a highly finished style that refl ects and embodies the aesthetic… Read More ›
Analysis of Ellen Glasgow’s Jordan’s End
“Jordan’s End,” which first appeared in Ellen Glasgow’s collection The Shadowy Third (1923), shows the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” a kinship that Glasgow acknowledged. In Glasgow’s story, the ill-fated Jordan family… Read More ›
Analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia
Coming after two novellas featuring Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four), “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a short detective story, first appeared in the Strand magazine in July 1891. It recounts the case of the king… Read More ›
Analysis of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel
Inspired by his fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel is on one level a stoic evocation of the pains and frustrations of romantic love and on another level a profound metaphysical… Read More ›
Analysis of G. K. Chesterton’s The Blue Cross
“The Blue Cross” appeared in The Storyteller magazine in September 1910 and heralded the first appearance of G. K. Chesterton’s most famous and enduring creation, Father Brown. The story, and the five further stories that followed at monthly intervals, were… Read More ›
Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s Nights
Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), an American-born author who worked under the penname H. D., did much of her writing while living in London, England. She was initially best known for her poetry despite an abundant corpus of plays and fiction and… Read More ›
Analysis of Bernard Malamud’s The Jewbird
One of the most frequently anthologized of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Jewbird,” from the 1963 collection Idiots First, with its original blending of magical realism and humor to demonstrate the serious effects of bigotry and hatred, rarely fails to elicit… Read More ›
Analysis of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man
The Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) began his career as a writer of sensational, rather diabolical tales influenced in part by Western writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde. Celebrated for his masterful plotting and psychological… Read More ›
Lost Generation Short Stories
As part of the modernist imperative to “make it new,” writers of the 1920s and 1930s consistently wreaked havoc with existing genre conventions. “Poems” no longer rhymed and scanned predictably; essays and reviews had a subjective, even idiosyncratic, slant; plays… Read More ›
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