Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - J. Gerald Kennedy (essay date 1983)


Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - J. Gerald Kennedy (essay date 1983)

J. Gerald Kennedy (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: “Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction” in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, edited by Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow, University of Georgia Press, 1983, pp. 39-65.

[In the essay that follows, Kennedy discusses four conceptual models of death in Poe's fiction: physical annihilation, compulsion, separaration, and transformation.]

The tales of Edgar Allan Poe display an elaborate repertoire of supernatural motifs, so well adapted to the evocation of horror that one might suppose the frisson to be their exclusive object. Otherwise discerning readers have thus fixed upon such phantasmagoria as evidence of Poe's “pre-adolescent mentality”—to recall the judgment of T. S. Eliot—and concluded that his otherworldly tales amount to little more than gimcrackery. Even those with a scholarly regard for Poe's achievement sometimes assume (as the...

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