The revolution greatly expressed the heart of the American people; however, it would take another fifty years of development throughout America before it produced the first great generation of American writers such as, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Paine and Edgar Allen Poe, just to name a few. ... Poe was the master of criticism - he developed his own theory on the mechanics of composition (short story and poetry), he confronted the dark side of human behavior, and what scares humans to insanity. ... Poe confronted the dark side of human behavior and made his writings come to life with his use o...

• Word Count: 902
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as, among many things, a master of dark fiction. ... Both his mother and his wife died young, leaving gaping wounds in Poe's heart. ... According to his own reasoning, the point of the poem is pleasure through beauty, even if that beauty is dark and tragic. ... For a person who invested so much ink exploring the common darkness and capacity for madness in everyone, this is an undeniably optimistic expression of positive equality. ...

• Word Count: 964
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In, "The Tell-Tale Heart," it is the madness of the man which brings him to murder his employer and at the end of this particular story, the madness – or the acuteness of senses as it is frequently described by Poe – serves also as the man's punishment since the unbearable sound of the beating of his own guilty heart forced him to confess. ... "3 Besides frightening subjects like death, disease, dark setting, haunted locations and others, characters who exhibit madness4 are the gothic elements incorporated in number of his stories, like for example in, "The...

• Word Count: 1406
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Though well known for works such as: Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado, Poe is also recognized as being the creator of Gothic writing. Poe's Gothic writing style primarily focused around the themes of death and mourning which lands him a place in the dark romanticism genre. His extreme writing style separates him from other writers as his dark tone creates him a space in a genre of his own. ...

• Word Count: 1445
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The last paragraph of the story lends more credence to the fact that he is a psychopath in which he tells us "[his] heart grew sick – on account of the dampness of the catacombs." ... These three stories have similar components; while Poe and Faulkner both use of dark humor and irony in their stories, all three have the overarching theme of mental illness. ...

• Word Count: 799
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate