Edgar Allan Poe, one of the central figures in nineteenth-century American literature and for late Romanticism, helped infuse new life into several forms of writing during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly the tale of terror, the detective story, science fiction, the short poem, and literary theory and criticism. While a somewhat controversial figure during his lifetime, and plagued with a lukewarm literary reception until the publication of his highly acclaimed poem “The Raven” in January of 1845, Poe has today become a major figure not only in American but in world literature. A master of the Gothic short story with its metaphysical intricacies, an effective practitioner of the proto-Symbolist poem with its emphasis on …
Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are not a subscriber, please click here to read about membership. All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors.