By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘William Wilson’ is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic stories, and, in its way, is the precursor to such later tales as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Markheim’, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and perhaps even, more recently, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. But the precise meaning of the story remains unclear.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) often gets the credit for inventing the detective story. Although some earlier candidates have been proposed – such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ (1819), and ‘The Secret Cell’ (1837), written by Poe’s own publisher, William Evans Burton – it was Poe who really showed what could be done with the detective story form.
‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) is one of three ground-breaking stories Poe wrote featuring C. Auguste Dupin, his amateur sleuth without whom the world would never have had Sherlock Holmes or, one suspects, virtually any other fictional detective.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘To Helen’ is one of the most popular poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). It still regularly appears in some of the best poetry anthologies – though, confusingly, Poe went on to write another poem with the same title. The ‘To Helen’ we reproduce below is, however, the famous and celebrated one. It was first published in 1831 in Poems of Edgar A. Poe, which appeared when Poe was still in his early twenties, although Poe made a few tweaks to the poem in 1845 – it is the final version that appears below. In this post, we offer some notes towards an analysis of ‘To Helen’ in terms of its form, metre, language, and meaning.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
In this guest post, Dr Peter Templeton offers some fascinating facts about a largely forgotten American author, John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870).
It isn’t out of the ordinary for an author who is popular in their own day to fall from grace in later years. Sometimes this is accelerated or amplified because progress leaves certain views – and, indeed, authors – looking decidedly out of step with what is now accepted, as was the case with a lot of antebellum Southern writing. Of these, one of the most well-connected and fundamentally interesting writers of his day was the author, lawyer and statesman John Pendleton Kennedy. Here a few choice facts about his life and work:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Compiling a list of the best Edgar Allan Poe short stories is always going to prove controversial, because he wrote many more classics than a ‘top 10’ list could ever dream of comprehensively capturing.
So the following does involve some omissions – ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and several other well-known tales – because our list is designed to showcase the sheer variety of Poe’s stories, and the various genres which he helped to develop (Gothic horror, ghost story, science fiction, detective story).