In many of the stories we have read in class, the theme of mental illness has been present. ... Mental illnesses, at the times of these stories being published, were not very well understood and made them fascinating and disturbing to the readers. ... 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." ... Charlotte Gilman actually suffered from depression herself and the treatments used on her are believed to be her inspiration for writing this story. ... Th...

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

Best known for his short stories flooded with mystery and the macabre, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost masters of horror that United States has ever produced. ... Furthermore, in his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, he defends short story as preferable to the novel and states that the ideal short story should be short enough to be read at one sitting in order to preserve this unity of effect or rather impression. ... "2 On that account in Poe's short stories every aspect of the tale contributes to its overall tone, including the motif of madness. ... Therefore th...

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

In Angela Carters 'The Bloody Chamber' death appears in most of the short stories, but in different ways both actually and metaphorically. ... Similarly, in "The Snow Child," the count appears to have an unhealthy fascination with death as an act of necrophilia arises at the climax of the short story. ... As the short story progresses, the narrator discovers more and more victims of the Marquis's murders. ... This event of graphic necrophilia is considered the most graphic image in the collection of short stories which explicitly portrays the Count's obsession with death ...

• Word Count: 1039
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Abstract This article applies some concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis to Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait". ... The main focus will be the traces of Freud's ideas on the "Life and Death Drives", "Guilt Complex", "Fixation", "Sublimation", "Dream work" and "Ideal Female complex" in this short story. ... Discussion At First, when Poe wrote this short tale he called it "Life in Death" but later he changed its title to "The Oval Portrait" .As an overall picture or a summary for the...

• Word Count: 3098
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In the case of the chosen pieces, short story "William Wilson"" by Edgar Allan Poe and the poem "The Tunnel"" by Mark Strand, both stories slowly draw the reader into an empathy with the main characters. The short story by Poe forces the reader to attempt to find veiled redeeming qualities within the main character, William Wilson. ... Strand, on the other hand, chooses the short verse as a means to transport the reader into the world that he has created for the main characters and one that must be completed within the mind of the reader. ... The theme of both stories is obviously the concept ...

• Word Count: 1660
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Firstly the concept of unnatural storyworlds mean that do not comply with what the reader knows is otherwise physically, logically, or humanly impossible in the physical world; one example of this could be Robert Cover`s "The Babysitter" a short story which depicts numerous irreconcilable event sequences. ... The most important example of this could be The Tell-Tale Heart; is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which the narrator tries to persuade us of his sanity while he is describing a murder that he committed. ... With this story the author intends to convey us, through unreliabl...

• Word Count: 863
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Before Bierce wrote this short story, he was first lieutenant during the American Civil War. In his short story, you will find many detailed scenarios believed to have really happened during Bierce's military career. ... With all the characteristics and details found in this story, it's clear that this story is a model of realism literature. ... The literary work of realism shows it isn't always a happy ending at the end of each story. ... This story shows us we have no control of our destiny. ...

• Word Count: 959
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The short story "William Wilson" employs the internal conflict of the narrator with an imaginary doppelganger to illustrate the conflicts between a man and his conscience. The gothic mood of the story which follows a dark and mysterious form, intensifies the atmosphere of Poe's psychological conflict, and drives the story like a mystery way to its conclusion. Moreover, the writing style of story is very calm and common even with the conflict that amplifying the story's mysterious mood. Because the story contains an unreliable narrator, we cannot trust that we are seeing the...

• Word Count: 591
• Approx Pages: 2
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In the short story The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe utilizes a variety of methods to manipulate not only the reader's emotions but also their mind by making what people dreaded and detested most come to life while at the same time retaining his readers by laying down a trap that lures and keeps them in and the only way out is to finish reading. ... The opening of the story establishes an opposition amid the narrator's experience of what has the potential to be a supernatural force and his elucidation of the events as understandable by obtuse psychological law or merely his nerves...

• Word Count: 374
• Approx Pages: 1
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Greatness came with a strong nation and thousands of poems and stories that shaped our nation. ... 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. ... (The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe) As a short-story writer, Poe was a fascinating man of imagination. ... He was the first author in American literature to make the neurotic, the heroic figure, the protagonist, in his stories. ...

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

Edgar Allan Poe was known to the world for his horrific, jaw dropping short stories and poems and also for being a literary genius of his time due to the unfamiliar writing style he presented. ... Arthur Conan Doyle says "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed, where the detective story was until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Dupin was a fictional French Detective initially appearing in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which was considered to be the first detective fiction story. ... In order to create the h...

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

In "The Cask Of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe, the personality of Montresor is explicitly demonstarted to the audience through numerous literary techniques employed by Poe throughout the story. ... This frame of mind carries through Poe's short story as we are taken down a road of Montresor's one track mind. ... As previously mentioned, it is obvious that Montresor dislikes Fortunado from the very opening of the story, however as we read further we see the deeply homicidal and blood lustful aspects of Montresor's thought process. ... But he wants it on his own terms, and to re...

• Word Count: 524
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

"The Fall of the House of Usher," " a short story published in 1939, is one of the most popular fictional narratives of Edgar Allan Poe. ... This mythic tale, and Poe's other terror short stories alike, aims at arousing readers' sense of inner disgust or terror, as Poe himself stated in his preface to "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque"" (1840) that the terror he meant to create was "not of the Germany, but of the soul." ... As the story moving forward, more and more unexpected events popped out and what capture us in surprise were Lady Madeline's burial, her reappearance...

• Word Count: 1692
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Cutting his trip short, Baudelaire, upon his return to Paris, became even more determined to devote himself to writing [3]. ... Besides his writing of poetry, he wrote a number of prose works, including a collection of art and literary reviews and several short stories and novels. His earliest work, in 1847 was a short autobiographical story titled La fanfarlo. ...

• Word Count: 1229
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Akutagawa Ryunosuke, a modern Japanese author of the Taishō era, recounts the murder of a man through seven different peoples' accounts, one of them including the dead man himself, in his short story "In a Bamboo Grove." In Ryunosuke's story, he questions the way in which the truth can vary based on the perspectives of others. ... After the story is finished and the reader has read everyone's testimonies, including the dead man's spirit, the reader is still unsure as to who committed the murder. ... There is no certainty as to who committed the murder in his sto...

• Word Count: 683
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Arising from these new techniques came the Romantic approach to the development of Gothic novels, and short stories. ... Poe establishes many connections for the reader, hinting at the true significance of the story through symbols portrayed as characters and events. ... The foundation of the story's meaning is found within the connection between Roderick and Madeline. ... The unity of tone conveys a unity of effect throughout the story. ... As the story concludes it becomes apparent that the original intention of Edgar Allan Poe was to create a horror story that could be viewed as an all...

• Word Count: 1147
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In fact, there were a number of stories circulating which focused upon sexually transgressive clergymen, and this may have been an influence on Hawthorne's portrayal of Arthur Dimmesdale. ... Edgar Allan Poe: his work was fiercely original, refining the short story genre, establishing detective fiction, and prefiguring the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. ... Nathaniel Hawthorne: many of Hawthorne's stories are set in Puritan New England, and his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America. ...

• Word Count: 917
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Moreover, the short story consists of an old man with whom the narrator's relationship is a bit hazy, despite the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" fits the way that the old man may be a relative whose death can fiscally profit the writer (53). ... The story starts of with disloyalty by attempting to persuade the reader he is not crazy, however the reader rapidly derives the writer as someone wild. ...

• Word Count: 759
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The most well-known writer of this time was Mark Twain, complimented for one of the most famous short stories in American literature, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. ...

• Word Count: 774
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Poe, well known today for his poetry and short stories, such as "The Pit and the Pendulum", is regarded by many to be the founder of the modern detective story. He often wrote horror stories and psychological thrillers, while at the same time exploring the human mind and individual emotions. ...

• Word Count: 1786
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate