San Antonio College Library

Contemporary critical opinions and commentaries on Edgar Allan Poe and his works, with a chronology.

"[This book] is the exploration by a distinguished American poet and critic of his own lifelong fascination with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. ... Delving ... into the clues to Poe's achievement--as poet, as aesthetician, as inventor of science fiction and the mystery tale, as explorer of the human soul--Daniel Hoffman builds a sympathetic case for this tormented author, baring the secret of his 'inescapable truths' and the hold they have on his readers."--Dust...

Best known as the author of imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, and as the author of hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was a leading practitioner of the American Gothic and helped popularize the short story as a genre. This reference work assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover...

"Controversies abound in studies of Edgar Allan Poe. From the time of Poe's death well into the twentieth century, partisans debated the issue of his character: was he an alcoholic? drug addict? pathological liar? necrophile? In the 1920s and 30s, psychoanalytic critics sought to divorce the study of Poe from Victorian moral concerns, but in the process made scandalous claims by linking Poe's dreamlike stories to his personality." "The status of Poe's...

The chilling creativity of the American Gothic has retained its power to attract readers since it burst onto the literary scene in the eighteenth century, yet it has been the object of serious scholarship for only a few decades. Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association, the new edition of this anthology incorporates the whole range of factual and imaginative writing, from Cotton Mather's account of the witchcraft trials...