Critical Insights: The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

The original essays in this set illuminate the influences that shaped Poe, contextualize his work, and assess his enduring impact on American and European poetry and fiction. A sketch of the historical and cultural forces surrounding Poe illuminates their influence on his aesthetic; a reception history examines Poe’s enduring contributions to the short-story genre, the French Symbolist movement, and modernist aesthetics; a comparison of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s works reveals how the two authors exploited the duplicitous possibilities within the writer-reader relationship; and a critical reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Ligeia,” and “Berenice” seeks to expose the stories’ unifying aesthetic principles.