#Gothic literature edgar allan poe movie

The etymology of the word 'Gothic' is from the French gothique and in Latin, Gothi, which means 'not classical.' A reference to the ancient Germanic people's language, it became a medieval style of art and architecture that emerged in Northern Europe in the 1640s, and by the 19th century became a literary style that used medieval settings to suggest mystery and horror. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett.The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane.The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne.Hartshorn daguerreotype of Poe (1848), public domain image (bottom): title page for Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol 1 (1840), Wikimedia Commons. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. For more horrific recommendations, see our pick of the greatest Gothic horror novels.

#Gothic literature edgar allan poe movie

įor more American literature, discover these classic movie adaptations of American novels.

Most of Edgar Allan Poe’s best short stories are available in an excellent affordable annotated edition as The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (Penguin Classics). Learn about his classic poem ‘To Helen’ here. Go and have your spine chilled with this classic tale.Ĭontinue your interesting Poe odyssey with some of his prophecies that came true and some of the more outlandish facts about Poe’s life. The story combines the Gothic house, the old aristocratic family on its last legs, the idea of the dead returning to life, and various other hallmarks of classic Gothic fiction. Although it’s often called the first detective story, there are a number of other candidates for this honour, as we revealed in our short history of detective fiction.Īnother story which, like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, might be called a Gothic novel in miniature, ‘ The Fall of the House of Usher‘ is regularly named one of Poe’s best stories.

We won’t offer spoilers here as to the story’s surprising resolution, but suffice to say that ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ went a long way towards creating the locked-room mystery genre of detective stories. Auguste Dupin, as a ‘very inferior fellow’). One of the first modern detective stories, this – and ‘The Purloined Letter’ – clearly influenced Conan Doyle in his creation of Sherlock Holmes (who, in the first novel in which he appears, refers to Poe’s fictional detective, C. Like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, this is a story about guilt and remorse, and an interesting and ambiguous take on the ghost story. Thereafter, he will be ‘haunted’ by the cat – and his life is about the get much, much worse. If that isn’t horrific enough, the narrator, a violent alcoholic, then hangs the cat from a tree in his garden. He manages to see what the police failed to see – but to say more than that would be to reveal too much, so go in search of the missing letter here.Ī terrifying tale narrated by a man who drunkenly maims his pet black cat by gauging out one of its eyes (!).

The police cannot find the letter in the blackmailer’s apartment, although they know it must be there somewhere – so Dupin, the independent detective, is consulted. It is a theme that countless later writers of detective fiction, notably Conan Doyle, would utilise and adapt. This story centres on an indiscreet love letter, which has been stolen in order to be used for blackmailing purposes. This is one of the first ever detective stories and, like ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, features the literary inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, C.