The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Tales

Description

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction.

Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem `mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular — 'The Pit and the Pendulum', `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and `The Purloined Letter' — alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays, and political satires.

About the author

David Van Leer taught at Cornell and Princeton Universities, and was Professor of English and American Literature at University of California, Davis. He was a regular contributor to The New Republic on American culture from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and the author of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986) and The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (1995).

Table of contents

Introduction
MS Found in a Bottle
Berenicë
Morella
Ligeia
The Man That Was Used Up
The Fall of the House of Usher
William Wilson
The Man of the Crowd
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Eleonora
The Masque of the Red Death
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Gold-Bug
The Black Cat
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
The Purloined Letter
The Systems of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
The Imp of the Perverse
The Cask of Amontillado
The Domain of Arnheim
Hop-Frog
Von Kempelen and his Discovery
Explanatory Notes