The devil is in the details! No matter the task, one must pay attention to every aspect of its completion to avoid being swayed by the devil’s tactics of distraction and procrastination. Stories meant to scare have a difficult and all-consuming...

It is, arguably, a fallacy to use the word 'influence' when considering how Poe developed the Gothic genre in his own literature in light of his predecessors. The overtones of 'derivation' in the word risk unfairly discrediting the influence that...

In his comprehensive introduction to Gothic Tales Baldick outlines the vital role that Edgar Alan Poe, and in particular his first Gothic tale 'The Fall of the House of Usher', played in redefining the genre: 'Poe ensured that whereas before him...

The introductory paragraph of "Fall of the House of Usher" (90-91) is a sharp plunge into the deep, haunting tone of this story. The language of the narrative immediately brings the reader into the surreal and horrific world of the Ushers as the...

In “Sonnet X” and "The Fall of the House of Usher”, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Edgar Allan Poe, the respective authors, both argue that to be successful a person must have, as Richard Wilbur describes, rational and non-rational capabilities....

A statement becomes intelligible when its component elements integrate into a unified structure. Stories, then, would convey meaning insofar as they fufill the conventions and boundaries of their genre. Jacques Derrida, however, deconstructs this...

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the phantasmagoric setting Poe creates not only serves as an exquisite background for the story, but also gives the reader insight into the mystery of the characters. Through Poe’s descriptive personification,...

Comparisons of Edgar Allen Poe’s two Gothic tales, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, reveal a volume of similarities and some notable differences. From characters, language, settings, literary approach, even plot devices, “Ligeia” and...

Edgar Allan Poe was a great America gothic style writer of the eighteen hundreds. There is hardly a mention of early American literature that does not commend his work. Of his literature, The Fall of the House of Usher gives a certain air of...

Edgar Allan Poe composed “The Fall of the House of Usher” some two decades before Abraham Lincoln warned those living both above and below the Mason-Dixon about the dangers of trying to live comfortably inside a house divided against itself....

Terror in the soul of an individual was one of the main topics in the work of 19th century American writer, poet, journalist and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe. Inspired by the English Gothic novel, he tried to depict the horrors and fears in...

Famous Authors like Edgar Allan Poe have maintained their renowned title because few have come after who can capture the truly gothic and gloomy nature of their works. Fast forward roughly 150 years, and new age authors have begun to re-envision...

“To an anomalous species of terror, I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their...

Edgar Allan Poe, who was born in the early nineteenth century, had an undeniable impact on American literature. Influenced by the era’s trend, the Romanticism, he had written plenty of short stories, tales and poems spiced with gothic features and...

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” details the end of a southern aristocratic family line in a gothic manner which is to be expected of Poe. While Poe’s writing most prominently focuses on gothic quality, it is...

Often criticized for its sensationalism, melodramatic qualities, and its play on the supernatural, the Gothic novel dominated English literature from its conception in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole to its...

As the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” thinks to himself when he is unnerved by the sight of the story’s titular house, “while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power...

The mind-body divide, or mind-body dualism, was a philosophical theory that gained popularity in the seventeenth century and flourished thereafter. In this theory, the mind and body are separate entities, and in literature, this meant that men...

Gothic literature focuses on the darkest aspects of humanity. It was written in response to the change the authors faced in everyday life, as well as the challenges of world events. Gothic literature is a sub genre of the Romantic Movement, a...

Often, the elements of the mind and past developments play a key role in understanding events and writings. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe crafts tales that reveal the inner cravings that...

Like many gothic stories, the link between the exterior and the interior in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ becomes an exploration of into the human psyche. Critic Sara Wasson recently claimed that gothic fiction anticipated psychoanalysis – the...

Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, published in 1796, built on the Gothic tradition established by the earliest authors in the genre, including Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Although it was not the first Gothic novel, it was one of the earliest and...

Charlotte Brontë and Edgar Allen Poe use elements of the gothic in Jane Eyre, and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” respectively, to provoke individual feelings of suspense and fear. As is common to the gothic tradition, both writers use choppy,...

In his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe writes that in an ideal poem, "two things are invariably required first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness some...