Selected Tales

Fülszöveg

There was undoubtedly something psychopathic in Edgar Allan Poe's personality that found expression in such tales of intense but indefinable terror as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'The Masque of the Red Death'. At the time of their first publication in the late 1830s and the 1840s critics called these stories 'Germanic', to which Poe memorably replied: 'I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul'. But he was ingenious as well as imaginative, and his ingenuity is nowhere better displayed than in his superlative detective stories such as 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Purloined Letter'. He can justifiably be called the father of detective fiction, having anticipated almost every later development of the genre, from the locked room mystery to the creation of the omniscient detective ^nd his less intelligent companion.
An unusual feature of this new, chronologically arranged selection is that it includes stories of a less familiar kind. Poe was a much... Tovább

Fülszöveg

There was undoubtedly something psychopathic in Edgar Allan Poe's personality that found expression in such tales of intense but indefinable terror as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'The Masque of the Red Death'. At the time of their first publication in the late 1830s and the 1840s critics called these stories 'Germanic', to which Poe memorably replied: 'I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul'. But he was ingenious as well as imaginative, and his ingenuity is nowhere better displayed than in his superlative detective stories such as 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Purloined Letter'. He can justifiably be called the father of detective fiction, having anticipated almost every later development of the genre, from the locked room mystery to the creation of the omniscient detective ^nd his less intelligent companion.
An unusual feature of this new, chronologically arranged selection is that it includes stories of a less familiar kind. Poe was a much more varied writer than is generally realized, and Julian Symons widens our knowledge of Poe by including examples of his savagely comic, socially critical, and pseudo-documentary styles of writing.
Cover illustration; 'He shrieked once and once only . Illustration by Harry Clarke for 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library.
Oxford Paperbacks Oxford University Press
ISBN D-n-^fllS^E-^
9780192815224 Vissza