Poe, "The House of Usher," and the American Gothic

by Perry, Dennis R.; Sederholm, Carl H.

• ISBN13: 9780230615267
• ISBN10: 0230615260
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is arguably one of the most dominant tales haunting American Gothic literature. This iconic story's influence lies in the inspired tensions between its simplicity and its inexplicable mingling of supernatural and psychological elements. Poe, the "House of Usher," and the American Gothicdiscusses how Poe's tale continues to serve as a model for exploring the deepest and most primitive corners of the human mind and heart. This study uses the Usher-inspired matrix of outsiders, uncanny houses, and psychic collapse and to reveal Poe's continued relevance to the genre through the fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.

Author Biography

Dennis R. Perry is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror and articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Carl H. Sederholm is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University. Sederholm has published several articles on American and Gothic literature, including work on Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. In 2006, his American Studies students awarded him their Professor of the Year Award.

Table of Contents

"Easily meeting the high standards that Gothic studies from Palgrave Macmillan have been setting in recent years, the main result is thus a readable, compelling, and useful contribution to Gothic studies generally and to the history of the American Gothic in particular."--NBOL-19

“Poe, ‘The House of Usher,’ and the American Gothic is a welcome addition to the scholarly canons of Poe, the other writers included in their study, and the tradition of the American Gothic.”--Tony Magistrale, Professor and Associate Chair of English, University of Vermont