Who's Edgar Alan Poe's audience that he wrote for?

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Who is Edgar Alan Poe's audience that he wrote his stories for? What kind of interests did his audiences have and what was their knowledge base?

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2002

Answers

His audience was the educated mainstream of that time in America. Knowledge of the classics, current literature and other languages was fairly sophisticated and he pulled no punches and wrote down to no one although he plainly was a master of popular effect. Education still bore the Eurpoean stamp and well bred Amemricans(including Poe) studied abroad and took that as their cultural base. So the Eurp[oean schools of Romanticism, German gothic and philosophies and sciences actually dominated over purely American material that slowly came into its own(J F Cooper eg)

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2002

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