American literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 40 pages of analysis & critique of American literature.

American literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 40 pages of analysis & critique of American literature.
This section contains 10,532 words
(approx. 36 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by J. Gerald Kennedy

SOURCE: “Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction,” in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, edited by Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow, University of Georgia Press, 1983, pp. 39-65.

In the following essay, Kennedy discusses four conceptual models of death in Poe's fiction: physical annihilation, compulsion, separation, and transformation.

The tales of Edgar Allan Poe display an elaborate repertoire of supernatural motifs, so well adapted to the evocation of horror that one might suppose the frisson to be their exclusive object. Otherwise discerning readers have thus fixed upon such phantasmagoria as evidence of Poe's “pre-adolescent mentality”—to recall the judgment of T. S. Eliot—and concluded that his otherworldly tales amount to little more than gimcrackery. Even those with a scholarly regard for Poe's achievement sometimes assume (as the author invited us to) that mystical elements in the fiction serve mainly to secure the necessary...

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This section contains 10,532 words
(approx. 36 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by J. Gerald Kennedy
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Critical Essay by J. Gerald Kennedy from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.