Tag: Essays

Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ is an 1846 essay by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Although he wrote the essay in order to explain how he came to write his hugely successful poem ‘The Raven’, it has become a key non-fiction work – probably the key […]

Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Death of the Author’ is an influential 1968 essay by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. But what does Barthes mean by ‘the death of the author’? This important short essay was crucial in the development of poststructuralist literary theory in the 1970s […]