![]() William Maginn’s stories, such as “The Man in the Bell” (1821), heavily influenced some of Poe’s most famous gothic horror (including “The Pit and the Pendulum”). The magazine was best known for its horror. In the same critical essay Poe refers briefly to the many traces of “terror, or passion, or horror” that can be found in “many fine examples of which were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood.” This reference is to Blackwood’s Magazine, a British miscellany that began publishing in 1817 and included the works of Percy Pysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other key British Romantics. And it also argues that the short story (the “tale”), had become, for Poe, the preeminent prose medium. It’s highly compositional understanding of what makes a good story work. ![]() A good story should have a “single effect,” and that effect should be conveyed to the reader-through a combination of events-in the period of between thirty minutes and two hours. The emphasis of the passage above is on the rhetorical effect of the reading experience, not the message, moral, or deeper meaning. In remarks like this, Poe underscores the massive shift taking place in 19th-century literature. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents-he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. ![]() …Ī skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. Were we called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfil the demands of high genius-should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion-we should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. In his 1842 work of literary criticism, “Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales,” Poe editorializes Hawthorne’s short stories in a way that’s become highly useful for making sense of what Poe himself seems to be doing. In “Young Goodman Brown,” the wilderness becomes a site of horror, the opposite of Emersonian redemption. Hawthorne stories are often allegorical and can be read morally, as though each one preaches some deep truth about human nature, as he casts a backward glance at his Puritan ancestors. In short stories like “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne depicts characters who are broken by cynicism and doubt. If Emerson urges his readers to rediscover the spiritual emblems and hieroglyphics scattered throughout nature, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville tend to question whether humans can return to that kind of Swedenborgian ecstasy (Swedenborg believed the apocalypse occurred in 1757, followed by a new kingdom that could be experienced by all). This “dark” Romanticism, as it’s sometimes called, includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. In fact Emerson’s Nature manifesto suggests returning to a simpler, more solitary encounter with non-urban environments will help individuals get in touch with something deeper in themselves.ĭuring the same period (later termed the “American Renaissance”), another group of writers explored less optimistic views of human nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s network of literary and intellectual partnerships, often called the “Transcendentalists,” adopted a mostly optimistic, mystical embrace of human potential and a belief that humans and nature remain intimately united. ![]()
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