In The Black Cat it is made apparent, that death is a common subject, but the beginning is primarily an internal struggle within the narrator.

Most of Poe’s works are easily identified as gothic due to the theme of death and decay, although that is not always the theme being portrayed by the story until later in the work. Edgar Allen Poe is widely known for making some of the greatest Gothic texts, but also has very distinct characteristics throughout his, modeling after Walpole, but also creating a standard for future texts. The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe uses an abundance of adjectives to set a gloomy scene, but also uses the narrator’s emotional distress and supernatural curiosity to structure the gothic tale. Novels and stories frequently revisit the same elements when creating a gothic tale, but can also use other characteristics to create the same essence of Castle of Otranto.

This text was the first novel of its kind to introduce, a suspenseful atmosphere, ancient prophecies, and metonymy of horror. Poe’s imaginative brilliance is evident in his distinctive ability to stir, frighten and induce apprehension in the mind of the reader, and timeless stories such as ‘ The Tell-Tale Heart’ are examples of why he remains one of the kings of Gothic literature to this day.Traditional Gothic characteristics were originally exemplified by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. There are no wasted words here, no diversion from the effect, and for the reader, no desire to turn away. Poe uses this “hook” to keep us on the edge of our seats, feeling unease, as we wait to find out what’s going to happen. This introduction to the narrator unequivocally tells us that that he’s mentally unstable and something terrible is about to happen yet the restraint Poe utilizes reels us in to seek a closer look, drawing our curiosity further along as if tied to a literary leash. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily -how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. “TRUE! -nervous -very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses -not destroyed -not dulled them. In appreciation of Poe’s genius, here’s the opening paragraph of ‘ The Tell-Tale Heart,’ the story, as I mentioned previously, is the one most prominently featured in my book about dark fantasy vigilante justice. However, in The Tell-Tale Heart, the reader is only provided with a remote location, separate from the rest of the world. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the classic original Gothic elements that I quoted earlier, of ‘monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors,’ are, essentially, the location of the story. I’m referring to, primarily, The Tell-Tale Heart and, secondly, The Pit and the Pendulum.

Two of those stories are the main ones highlighted in my novel, The Poe Consequence. In addition to a number of his works possessing the physical elements as noted in my first sentence, Poe took that darkness and enhanced those ominous environments with stories of death and decay, murder, live burials, physical and mental torture, insanity, and retribution from beyond the grave. Over these last two hundred fifty years a great number of authors followed in Walpole’s footsteps, with personal favorites such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula among the most enduring of this genre.Īnother of those Gothic authors whose fame and impact have lasted through today is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe. According to the editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the ‘imaginative impulse’ of Gothic novels was ‘drawn from medieval buildings and ruins,’ and ‘commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors.’ The first novel to acclaim fame for it’s Gothic elements was titled, Castle of Otranto, written in 1765 by an Englishman named Horace Walpole.

Gothic literature edgar allan poe