What Is Edgar Allan Poe The Fall Of The House Of Usher

EDGAR ALLAN POE: A GOTHIC WRITER AND THE HORROR GENDER IN LITERATURE. by Marisa Serrano

Edgar Allan Poe's literature has been always linked to murderers, psycho men and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been published since 1827, including well-known poems such as "The Raven" or "The Fall of the House of Usher". However, that is not all. Poe wrote a wide range of genres as well that not many people know: poetry, short stories, novels, a book of scientific theory, hundreds of essays and book reviews.

Poe's reputation nowadays rests mainly on his tales of terror, and we consider him to be the first American gothic writer. Unfairly, Poe has also been seen as his characters: a mysterious figure who wanders around graveyards
The horror genre has frequently been ignored by critics, including in Poe's time. When critics used to complain about Poe's "gothic" tales, he argued that terror was part of life and, therefore, a legitimate subject for literature. Poe's first published horror tale was "Metzengerstein", and in Poe's next horror tales, he would move the action to an everyday setting like a home ("The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat") or a school ("William Wilson"). Whatever setting he chose, he did not pay attention of the location aspect but to the psychology of his characters. Poe also got inspired by the news launched on newspapers back at his time: murders, premature burial and grave robberies. As a magazine editor, he knew that people were interesting in those kind of stories. Therefore, Poe's tales of terror remain among his most popular works and have influenced later famous writers like Steven King, and even filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock.

Poe is also considered America's first literary critic. During his lifetime, American authors were generally considered inferior to the their British counterparts, so many American authors limited themselves to just imitating British literature. As a critic, Poe attacked those authors, and he was often the first to accuse an author of plagiarism. Many critics in Poe's time knew the authors whose work they were making a critic about, so they made fake reviews
For example, he admired the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browing so much that he even dedicated his book "The Raven and Other Poems" to her. When judging the quality of the author's work, Poe also explained his criteria to define good writing: he considered that the entire story should be composed with an emotional impact in mind. In other words, Poe believed that a good writer should begin his stories by determining first the ending and its emotional effect. Unnecessary event should therefore be omitted. That was the reason why he thought that a story or poem should be brief, and, in his own opinion, they were much better than long novels because, as he himself said, "as it cannot be read in one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality." If the reader had to stop in the middle of reading, the emotional impact the story tries to achieve would be gone due to all the distractions of the real