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Edgar Allan Poe
In Poe's short story entitled "The Oval Portrait," the unnamed narrator is in Italy where he is in a "desperately wounded condition." In order to get the narrator out of the damp air his valet has...
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Edgar Allan Poe
I’d like to start by saying that the answer to this question is going to differ from person to person. It’s asking an opinion. Different people are going to find different stories more...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's mystery stories broke new ground because of his imaginative plot lines. Three of his stories are widely regarded to be the first American detective fictions: "The Murders in the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe wrote this poem as he was witnessing the slow death (from tuberculosis) of his young wife, Virginia Clemm Poe. He imagines all too clearly the separation her death will bring to...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poe is using a characteristic (for him) rhetorical move in which he says how bad it would be to do a certain thing then goes on to do exactly that thing. In this story, he talks about horrible...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s poem is thought to addressed to Frances Osgood, a prominent poet in New York with whom Poe famously flirted – probably platonically -- for several years. The gist of the poem is fairly...
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Edgar Allan Poe
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is poring over "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." The mood of the poem is "dreary" from the very first stanza; we are told that it's...
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Many themes in Edgar Allen Poe's works concern mankind's internal battle between good and evil. Similarly, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee shows us that human beings have both good and evil...
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Literature
Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" is an allegorical short story about the struggle between mankind's dual nature, the moral conscience and the evil instinctive nature. Similarly, in To Kill a...
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Edgar Allan Poe
The accepted theory is that Poe may have become inspired to write the story "The Fall of the House of Usher" by events that took place years before he was born, in the year 1800. According to the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
No. Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" is full of figurative language, but it has no similes. Similes are figurative comparisons using the word "like" or "as." If Poe had written, for example,...
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Edgar Allan Poe
By giving some characters real names and others silly ones or mere numbers, Poe is allowing his narrator, the highly ridiculous Thomas Smith, to illustrate his lofty, supercilious habit of...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Since the speaker of the poem appears to be wallowing in solitude and grief, it's a good idea to look for glimmers of hope in his thoughts and speech to see what it is he might want--aside from all...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poe is fascinated by death, but more than that, by the state of mind contemplating death creates. Death figures in many of Poe's works: In his poem "Annabel Lee," Annabel dies in her "kingdom by...
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Edgar Allan Poe
The word "lionize," in general usage, means to treat an individual or an object "as an object of great interest or importance." We see through the story that the narrator and main character,...
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Edgar Allan Poe
It may seem strange to think of the narrator of "The Tell Tale Heart" -- a murderer -- in a sympathetic light, but to an extent Poe is able to make him so through strong characterization and point...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Regarding the first question about the use of "farther" or "further" in line 57, it appears that Poe used "farther" in the poem. You will find texts of the poem online, and probably in print, that...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Literal associations would be hard to determine. He was not a member of the University of Virginia or West Point Alumni Associations; to the degree that they might have existed in the late 1820s,...
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Edgar Allan Poe
As the 207th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe falls on the 19th of January, 2016, speculation again revolves around the identity of the individual or individuals responsible for a...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Most of Poe's "Eleonora" fits more neatly in the Romantic style (Gothic being an off-shoot of this). However, the setting in the undetermined past and the virginal maiden are both elements of the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the authors cited here, are well known for themes of death and mortality occurring in their works. Poe's approach tends to be one exploring the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Let's first look for the elements that are ever-present in the Gothic genre. These elements consist on specific literary devices which authors use, particularly in the setting, to convey feelings...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poe believed that the point of writing poems or stories was to create an emotional response in the reader. That means that his fiction is less concerned with realism, per se, than it is with...
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History
While it is tempting to want to read many of Poe's works as being about his own personal life, or even to assume they are autobiographical, generally this is known to be untrue. According to the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
There are a few things in his stories that were a large part of his life. The biggest is alcoholism. This can be seen in a few of his stories. The biggest comes from The Black Cat, in which the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
"Alone" is a poem told in the first-person point of view as an adult looks back on his childhood. The narrator realizes that a childhood of isolation and loneliness separated him from other...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Absolutely. Hop Frog not only gets to humiliate the councilmen of the King, and the King himself, but he also gets to insult them to their faces, scare them, disarm them, and put them in an...
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The Masque of the Red Death
A reader can interpret the title of Edgar Allan Poe's story of a masque as a disguise--the "disguise of Red Death," the guest who enters and really is his disguise--or as the party that is called a...
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Edgar Allan Poe
There are quite a number of examples of alliteration throughout the poem. The most common is the alliteration of the s-sound. Poe starts off with alliteration in the first line: Be silent in that...
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Edgar Allan Poe
There are several similarities between “The Black Cat” and “The Tell Tale Heart” by Poe. A couple of the main similarities are: Both stories are narrated by an insane character. There is...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Transcendentalism affected Edgar Allan Poe’s literature because he abhorred it. Poe’s writing, considered part of the American Romantic period, was Dark Romantic. He wrote of evil and macabre...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Although Edgar Allan Poe's literary career is best known for its Romantic short stories and poems, he also worked as an editor and literary critic. In the 1830s, he began working for the Southern...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe wrote in a genre called "Gothic," which was intended to appeal to his audience in a similar way to modern horror movies. People enjoy being scared or "spooked," and Gothic writing...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Fans and literary critics of Edgar Allan Poe's stories can usually expect to find some of the same elements in every one of his stories. These are often called motifs, and are symbolic as well....
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Edgar Allan Poe
Part of the point of this question is to make you apply some version of what critics call "critical race theory" or "whiteness theory" to Poe. In other words, the point here isn't just reading Poe...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Roderick Usher has several character traits. The first is that he is isolated but still yearns for human contact. He and the narrator have been friends since they were boys. The narrator is his...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe wrote short stories and poems. His stories are of two types: horror stories, which are his most distinctive, and detective stories. The detective stories tend to be cool and...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is usually considered an example of the Romantic movement in the United States. Although his publications are slightly later than those of such well known British Romantics as...
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Gothic Literature
In Gothic art and literature, as distinct from Gothic architecture, an emphasis is placed on the intensity of emotional responses to landscapes and specific places and, more specifically, on the...
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Literature
Arthur Conan Doyle did not shy away from acknowledging the influences upon his own writings—notably his American predecessor Edgar Allan Poe. Conan Doyle famously noted at one point that Poe’s...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Many of the major events in Edgar Allan Poe's life are reflected in his fiction. The basic elements of his biography start with his birth in 1809 to actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and less successful...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Alone" was never published during his lifetime. He wrote it in 1829 and, as a young man, was experiencing intense, conflicted feelings about his childhood and family life....
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Edgar Allan Poe
What one thinks about any given author is entirely a matter of personal opinion. One either enjoys reading a particular author’s work, or one doesn’t. Fortunately, in the case of Edgar Allan...
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Edgar Allan Poe
The fear of death has a profound impact on the characters in "The Premature Burial" and "The Masque of the Red Death." In both works, death occupies central importance in the characterizations. In...
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Literature
The themes of nature are found in many pieces of literature. We saw a movement, where writers were going back to nature, and moving away from what was considered the normal works of writings. Edgar...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is rich in both verbal irony and dramatic irony, both of which help create a story in which the narrator. Montresor, and his victim, Fortunato, inhabit an ironic...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Without doubt, there has been much debate on the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as to whether it is a tale of natural or psychological forces acting together,...
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Certainly, Poe explores the darker side of human nature and the psychology of evil with great complexity and depth. But, while To Kill a Mockingbird has its merit, the extent to which Harper Lee...
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Ligeia
This strategy used by Poe has the effect of making us, the readers, lose our bearings somewhat. We are from the first drawn into the intense world of Poe’s narrator – and as it is a...
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Edgar Allan Poe
One story you could consider is 'Ligeia'. The narrator here is an opium addict, but this is not mentioned until several pages into the story. In pieces such as 'The Black Cat', the narrator’s...
