Poe's Short Stories Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allen Poe is, perhaps, the most popular Gothic author in American history. Many of his stories show the darker side of humanity and provoke a sense of eeriness in the reader. But what exactly makes his stories creepy or uncanny? To answer...

The literary element of mood portrays the atmosphere of the work through its words and descriptions in order to create an emotional response within the reader. This allows the reader to develop an emotional attachment and interest in the story, as...

When you are trying to find treasure, you follow the map. When you read a story, you listen to the narrator. Once you get to the final destination, you might not find treasure, a disappointment which would mean that you had a deceptive map....

The opening words of the story “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe are a quote from the French opera Atys, “Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre N’a plus rien a dissimuler” (Poe 1). This translates roughly to the idea that a man who is dying...

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...

In “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” by Edgar Allen Poe, an unknown narrator recounts the circumstances that led to Augustus Bedloe’s mysterious death. The equally strange Dr. Templeton treats Bedloe, who suffers from neuralgia, using the practice...

In one of the first detective stories, “The Purloined Letter”, E. A. Poe creates an extraordinary character with a powerful personality, a master of ratiocination, and he lets the reader take part in the intriguing process of finding a missing...

In both “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, evil is something that the characters carry with them throughout the stories. The revelation of their personal evil is a journey that begins with the ostensible picture of faith and good...

Poe’s How to Write a Blackwood Article portrayed a symbiotic relationship between the soul, the body and money that drove the Victorian audience to search for an unattainable form of happiness in literature. Poe described the sought-after...

A labyrinth, on the surface, can be described as “a place constructed of or full of intricate passageways and blind alleys” (Merriam-Webster), but it can also be characterized as “something extremely complex or tortuous” (Merriam-Webster). Both...

Upon first reading, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Hop-Frog” appears to be a revenge tale that might leave the reader thinking that the victims of slavery end up as big as monsters as their captors after they exact their revenge and make their escape....

Eyes are often seen in literature as all-encompassing symbols of mystery, perception, awareness, and even omniscience. Many argue that the eyes are “the window to the soul,” meaning that they reveal even the most hidden emotions, desires, or...

For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, obsession is a central theme for their short stories. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator expresses a negative obsession for the pale-blue eye “with film over it” of an elderly man, but also...