By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) is one of the most famous stories by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story is a powerful exploration of the dark side of human nature. How Hawthorne loads his story with such power is worthy of some closer analysis, but before we get there, you can read ‘Young Goodman Brown’ here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (1946) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest later poems. In just sixteen lines and eight couplets, Stevens summons the quiet and calm of solitary reading inside a house. You can read ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
‘The Imp of the Perverse’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1845. Of all of Poe’s stories, this is one of the strongest tales to prefigure the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Before we proceed to a summary and analysis of this story, it might be worth reading ‘The Imp of the Perverse’; you can find it here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Premature Burial’ is a story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1844. The story taps into a fear which many people claim to harbour: taphephobia, or the fear of being buried alive. Before proceeding to our summary and analysis of this curious story, you might want to read ‘The Premature Burial’, which is available here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Man of the Crowd’ is one of the shorter short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe (who pioneered the short story form when it was still an emerging force in nineteenth-century magazines and periodicals). Written in 1840, the story is deliciously enigmatic and, in some ways, prefigures later fiction, including modernism. You can read ‘The Man of the Crowd’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.