Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher

The Home Life of Poe Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1974. Zayed, Georges. "The Genius of Edgar Allan Poe" Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1985.

Frankenstein: Creation and Monstrosity. NY: Reaktion Books, 1997. Print. Gigante, Denise. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein.” English Literary History 67.2 (2000): 565-87.

Reprinted by the Viking Press,1964:70-88. Poe,Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher". Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

“The Cask of Admontillado.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York: Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 274-79.

One very famous Dark Romantic writer is Edgar Allen Poe. Poe is very well known for his many poems and short stories. He is also well known for the recurring theme of death in his stories and poems. In the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, setting is used to create the mood of the story, foreshadow future events, and to portray the characteristics of characters and show who they really are. Edgar Allan Poe uses setting to create a melancholy and gloomy mood in the story.

The Ghastly Writings of Poe Edgar Allen Poe makes tales of imagination and fantasies the irrefutable realms of fear. His tales and poems “have influenced the literary schools of symbolism…as well as the popular genres of detective and horror fiction (Stern xxxviii). However, as many of Poe’s tales and poems conjure terror and trepidation, they also penetrate the imagination with fantasy. Poe repeatedly attempts and succeeds at making his readers endure analogous feelings as those characters in his works. The most common realms Poe writes about are dreams, fantasies, the subconscious, and glimpses of the afterlife.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1979. 27-97. Svilpis, J.E. "The Mad Scientist and Domestic Affection in Gothic Fiction."

The “urban gothic” as defined by Kathleen Spencer takes social and cultural trends of the time and creates fictions that center on the insecurities and familiar surroundings of Victorian England. In response, the actions and behaviors of characters change as well. In one example of urban gothic fiction, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson utilizes the norms and expectations of society to create a disturbing narrative that addresses the emerging concerns of decadence in Victorian high society. The advancement of Gothicism from focusing on the supernatural to exposing the unnatural is also evident in Jekyll and Hyde when compared with Walpole’s The Castle of Ortranto. In Walpole’s narrative, terror comes from ghostly or other worldly revenge.

The Enlightenment rejected the belief in superstition, and religion. Reason, deductive logic, and observation were the methods of examining the world. A clash of these two approaches is noticeable in Otranto. The novel violates 18th century standard of polite culture and proportion, which results in its being so popular among Walpole’s contemporaries, and is a source of different interpretations for modern readers. Evil is an important part of the book, it is presented in the actions of the main character of the novel, Manfred.

Due to Edgar Allan Poe’s loss of those he cared for throughout his life, Poe’s obsession with death is evident in his works of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, in which in all three death is used to produce guilt. At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe’s fascination with death is apparent when the narrator ruthlessly killed an old man with a disturbing eye, but felt so guilty that he confessed to the police. The narrator dismembered the old man’s body and hid them in the floor, confident that they were concealed. However, when the police came to investigate, the narrator heard a heart beating and began to crack under the pressure. Overcome with guilt, he confessed that he murdered him and pulled up the floorboards.