Short Story Criticism

American Renaissance | Eugene Current-García (essay date 1985)

Eugene Current-García (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Current-García, Eugene. “Poe's Short Fiction.” In The American Short Story before 1850: A Critical History, pp. 59-83. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

[In the following essay, Current-García discusses major thematic and stylistic elements of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.]

When Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 he had written and published, during the preceding twenty years, between seventy and eighty tales and sketches, some of which had been republished, with certain revisions, a number of times in different magazines. Many of his tales and sketches also reappeared in three collections during the last decade of his life: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a two-volume collection containing twenty-five pieces, 1840; The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, a small volume containing only “The Murders in the Rue Morge” and “The Man That Was Used Up,”...

[The entire page is 13290 words long]

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