- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics
Abstract and Keywords
This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Brockden Brown, Gothic fiction, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, William Godwin, supernaturalism in literature, philosophical materialism
Department of English, University of Ottawa
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- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics