Gothic Literature | Poe, Edgar Allan (1809 - 1849) - Clark Griffith (Essay Date 1972)

CLARK GRIFFITH (ESSAY DATE 1972)

SOURCE: Griffith, Clark. “Poe and the Gothic.” In Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, edited by Richard P. Veler and Richard Beale Davis, pp. 21-7. Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Music Press at Wittenberg University, 1972.

In the following essay, Griffith studies Poe’s impact on the treatment of madness in the Gothic tradition, asserting that Poe “was concerned with shifting… the locus of the terrifying.”

Despite the emphasis in his criticism upon a need for novelty, Poe’s tales of terror are clearly indebted to some literary forebears. From Gothic fiction of the English eighteenth century, Poe took the imagery of terror: the blighted, oppressive countryside; the machinery of the Inquisition; in particular, the haunted castle, swaddled in its own atmosphere of morbidity and decay. From the nineteenth-century Gothicized tales in...

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