need some info (preferably a website) explaining how fear and gothics were a theme in Edgar Allen Poe's writing!!! HELP!!!! THANKS...to n e one who knows

-- Anonymous, October 01, 2002

Answers

Poe has many a romantic hero in search of melancholy "adventures". Not so much a search for the experience of fear, although Poe seems to take an objective delight in terror tales. Looking for the shock, the sudden crossing of a boundary of experience where reason temporarily disappears and some awesome mystery suggests itself. The event can be traumatic, horrifying at the climax, but usually has some explanation even if the hero is trapped in some predicament. The Gothic is the dark side of European culture lurking in a dead past. Picture the cathedral and the Romantics would concentrate on its shadows, gargoyles, silences, awesome heights and superstitions while reveling in its beauty and melancholy ghostly past. Wild, hyper sensitive characters plunge trough fantastic landscapes or terrible claustrophobic traps, the shadows more conducive to mystery and groping beyond the normal. The pursuit of the supernormal is shaded by fear, darkness and danger.

www.eapoe.org has select articles from a journal on Poe's Dark Romanticism.

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2002