Imbedded in the tale is the psychological journey of an egocentric who derives pleasure from cruelty."(Pritchard, 148) While this explanation stands, it must be observed that Poe's intention went beyond the psychological investigation: his description of evil doing is almost always accompanied by a certain symbolism that alludes to the intrusion of the supernatural in human life. As Madden notes, Poe's primary goal is to make the readers uneasy by facing them fully with the un-explainable, with that which surpasses human understanding: "Poe makes his readers uneasy by confronting them with the limits of rational thought. He does not present the uncanny, but elicits it in the mind of the reader by presenting some things that are un-explainable and asking the reader to interpret them. It is not written as a psychoanalytic exercise, but to elicit uneasiness in the face of the un-explainable."(Madden, 60) Thus, Poe always combines the psychological with the supernatural in his stories, hinting at the connection between the human psyche and some hidden...
"Poe's 'The Black Cat' and Freud's 'The 'Uncanny'.'" Literature and Psychology. 39.n1-2 (Spring-Summer 1993): 52(11)
Edgar Allen Poe's 1843 short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is about a young man who becomes mortally obsessed with an old man's creepy eye and ultimately kills him. Thomas Hardy's 1902 poem "The Man He Killed" is about a soldier who has become used to killing people just because they are on the other side of the war. Both of these narratives lend insight into guilt related to death, told
Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fennimore Cooper, Mary Rowlandson, Walt Whitman) describe writing style, a discussion literary work. Edgar Allan Poe: Poe's amoral universe The American poet and short story author Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous mystery and horror writers of the 19th century. Contrary to many of his contemporaries, Poe
Purloined Letter" and Lacan Edgar Allen Poe's short mystery story "The Purloined Letter" offers an ideal location in which apply some of Jacques Lacan's theories regarding human psychology, and in particular his theory of identification outlined in the essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." Although Lacan is ostensibly discussing a process in childhood development, his discussion of self-identification offers useful insights into the identification (and misidentification)
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Watson, and his several forays into the real world to solve mysteries that confounded others. In this regard, Magistrale reports that, "Dupin solves crimes in part from his ability to identify with the criminal mind. He is capable of empathizing with the criminal psyche because Dupin himself remains essentially isolated from the social world" (21). In fact, Dupin also has a "sidekick" who serves as his narrator. According to
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