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EDGAR ALLAN POE-THE TELL-TALE HEART

------ American Renaissance (flourishing American letters and literature), 19 th Century
(around 1830)
a movement that would develop a unique American literary style to distinguish American
literature from British literature
------editor, poet, short story writer, critic, lecturer
------introduced the British horror story, the gothic genre in American literature, along with
the detective story, science fiction and literary criticism
-----Most often associated with the American Renaissance movement-: Ralpf Waldo Emerson,
N. Hawthrone, H. Melville, Walt WHITMAN
The Tell Tale Heart
---------UNNAMED narrator, addressing directly to the reader
-the narrative themes may reflect somehow the authors struggle in his real life
-Poe uses an economical style to provide a study of paranoia and mental deterioration
-----------the narrative: contains lot of details regarding murderers obsessions(thumping
sound, the olds man eye, the heartbeat), psychological contradictions, mental
deterioration, paranoia-unable to distinguish between real and imagined sounds,
paradox(people harm sometimes the ones they love), hypersensitivity of the characters-a
proof of ,,sanity, not a symptom of madness.

Edgar Allan Poe brought about several changes in the literary style of his time period.
Poe, as a writer, poet, editor and a critical writer influenced not only American literature, but he
also had an impact on international literature. He was one of the first writers to develop the
genre of both detective fiction and horror. Stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black
Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as poems like the
Raven set him apart from other writes of his time. Many anthologies credit him as the
"architect" of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on
the effect of the style and of the structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a
forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. Poes style still impacts writers
today. "Nearly every important American writer after Poe shows signs of influence, especially
when working in the gothic mode or with grotesque humor. The French, Italians, and writers in

Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas acknowledge and demonstrate their debts to Poe in
technique and vision." Steven King, Clive Barker and others have followed in the footsteps of
Poe. The genre of horror is bigger today than ever and Edgar Allan Poe was at the forefront of
this style of writing.
Poe had a very strong influence on Charles Baudelaire, who translated much of Poe's
work into English. Baudelaire, whose best-known work is the collection of poems titled Les
Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) actually idolized Poe. The French appreciated Poe more than the
Americans. Poe's work in French translation influenced many French writers and subsequently
influenced Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, whose novel Crime and Punishment shows the
strong influence of Poe. Poe was noted for focusing on the dark side of human nature. He is
known as the father of the detective novel, and had a direct influence on Arthur Conan Doyle,
creator of Sherlock Holmes. Since then there have been countless thousands of detective novels
published all over the world, as well as horror tales. Famous writers who follow in Poe's and
Doyle's footsteps are Agatha Christie, George Simenon, and Erle Stanley Gardner. Poe was one
of the first authors to write science-fiction stories and might be called the "father of sciencefiction." He has also been called "the father of the modern short story." American and English
writers were indirectly influenced by Poe via the French.
He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and
American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short
story. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary
reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked.
Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre that he followed to appease the public
taste.
literary theories: He disliked didacticism and allegory.