Edgar Allen Poe Notes ( 3rd hour. English 1)
I. Biographical Background
Kenneth Silverman argues that Poe's work is shadowed by the deaths of three women he loved intensely (in addition to Poe's best-known inspiration, his beloved young wife Virginia):
1. his mother (when he was about 2 years old) 2. Jane Stanard (idealized mother of a school friend), who died insane at age 28 ("To Helen") 3. Frances Allan (his foster mother)
Kenneth Silverman argues that Poe's work is shadowed by the deaths of three women he loved intensely (in addition to Poe's best-known inspiration, his beloved young wife Virginia):
1. his mother (when he was about 2 years old) 2. Jane Stanard (idealized mother of a school friend), who died insane at age 28 ("To Helen") 3. Frances Allan (his foster mother)
III. Types of Works Through all these phases , Poe wrote
Satiric tales.
Parodies and burlesques.
Grotesques: tales where one aspect of the character is heightened for a marked effect (note that this same concept was later used by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio).
"Grotesque" in Poe also implies a clash of opposites, a world in which the reader's certainties are undercut. Its fundamental element is disharmony, what Philip Thomson has called "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response" (27).
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: "The various forms of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought" (185).
Arabesques: tales involving the supernatural; according to Paul Reubens, "symbolic fantasies of the human condition."
Tales of ratiocination ("The Purloined Letter") that allow rational deduction and logic to counter the irrationality of grotesques and arabesques.
Hoaxes
Satiric tales.
Parodies and burlesques.
Grotesques: tales where one aspect of the character is heightened for a marked effect (note that this same concept was later used by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio).
"Grotesque" in Poe also implies a clash of opposites, a world in which the reader's certainties are undercut. Its fundamental element is disharmony, what Philip Thomson has called "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response" (27).
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: "The various forms of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought" (185).
Arabesques: tales involving the supernatural; according to Paul Reubens, "symbolic fantasies of the human condition."
Tales of ratiocination ("The Purloined Letter") that allow rational deduction and logic to counter the irrationality of grotesques and arabesques.
Hoaxes
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