num_pages: 1024
description: Enormously popular and widely admired, Edgar Allan Poe occupies an extraordinary place in American literature. Technically skillful and spiritually haunting, Poe's body of work poems, tales, a novel, and essays—awakens readers to the darker side of humanity. This Norton Critical Edition includes Poe's most important writing, introduced, annotated, and edited by leading Poe scholar G. R. Thompson."Backgrounds and Contexts" includes fifty-seven judiciously chosen documents that illuminate Poe's short but prolific career, among them Poe's reviews, prefaces, and related correspondence as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative Romanticism, psychological science, sensation fiction, and slavery and the South.Fourteen critical essays address the major themes and genres of Poe's work. Among the contributors are Richard Wilbur, Grace Farrell, Barton Levi St. Armand, J. Gerald Kennedy, and John T. Irwin. A Selected Bibliography and an Index to Works and First Lines of Poems are also included.--back coverTable of ContentsAcknowledgments	Edgar A. Poe—An American Life (1809-1849)	A Note on Texts and Annotations	The Texts of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe	POEMS	Introduction	Tamerlane	Dreams	Spirits of the Dead	Evening Star	Imitation	Stanzas: In Youth	A Dream	The Happiest Day	The Lake	Sonnet—To Science	Al Aaraaf	Introduction	Fairyland [1]	Fairyland [2]	Alone	To Helen [Stanard]	Israfel	The Sleeper	The Valley of Unrest	The City in the Sea	The Coliseum	Sonnet—Silence	Dream-Land	The Raven	Ulalume—A Ballad	The Bells	To Helen [Whitman]	A Dream Within a Dream	For Annie	Eldorado	Annabel Lee	TALES AND SKETCHES	Introduction	Metzengerstein	Loss of Breath [A Decided Loss]	MS. Found in a Bottle	The Assignation [The Visionary]	Lionizing [Some Passages in the Life of a Lion]	Shadow	Silence	Berenice	King Pest	Ligeia	How to Write a Blackwood Article	A Predicament [The Scythe of Time]	The Man That Was Used Up	The Fall of the House of Usher	William Wilson	The Man in the Crowd	The Murders in the Rue Morgue	A Descent into the Maelström	The Colloquy of Monos and Una	Never Bet the Devil Your Head	The Oval Portrait [Life in Death]	The Masque of the Red Death	The Pit and the Pendulum	The Tell-Tale Heart	The Gold-Bug	The Black Cat	The Premature Burial	The Purloined Letter	Some Words with a Mummy	The Power of Words	The Imp of the Perverse	The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar	The Cask of Amontillado	Hop-Frog	The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym	Selections from Eureka	Backgrounds and Contexts	Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tamerlane and Other Poems	Edgar Allan Poe—To B__________ (July 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—To Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham (May 4, 1833)	Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Folio Club	Edgar Allan Poe—To T. W. Hite (April 30, 1835)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Theodore Fay, Norman Leslie	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Morris Mattson, Paul Ulric	J. P. Kennedy—To Edgar Allan Poe (February 9. 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—To J. P. Kennedy (February 11, 1836)	J. K. Paulding—To T. W. White (March 3, 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Drake &amp; Halleck (April 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—To Harrison Hall (September 2, 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Robert M. Bird, Sheppard Lee (September 1836)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (September 1839)	Edgar Allan Poe—To Philip P. Cooke (September 21, 1839)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Moore, Alciphron	Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Groesque and Arabesque	Edgar Allan Poe—Prospectus for Penn Magazine	Edgar Allan Poe—To William E. Burton (June 1, 1840)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Night and Morning	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Lambert A. Wilmer, Quacks of Helicon	Edgar Allan Poe—Excordium to Critical Notices	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems	Edgar Allan Poe—Two Reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales	Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 4, 1842)	Edgar Allan Poe—To James Russell Lowell (July 2, 1844)	Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to the Marginalia series	James Russell Lowell—Our Contributors . . . Edgar Allan Poe	Anonymous [Edgar Allan Poe]—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Hood, Prose and Verse	Unsigned Review—Tales of Edgar Allan Poe	Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to The Raven and Other Poems	Edgar Allan Poe—The Philosophy of Composition	Edgar Allan Poe—To P. P. Cooke (August 9, 1846)	Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse	Edgar Allan Poe—The Poetic Principle	Edgar Allan Poe—A Reviewer Reviewed	George Graham—The Later Edgar Poe	Charles Baudelaire—Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works	Walt Whitman—[Edgar Poe's Significance]	TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ALTERNATIVE ROMANTICISM	Introduction	Frederic Henry Hedge—On Immanuel Kant and German Transcendentalism	Friedrich Schlegel—Fragments from Lyceum, Athenaeum, and Dialogue of Poesie	August Wilhelm Schlegel—The Tragic; The Comic	Jean Paul Friedrich Richter—Humoristic Subjectivity	SCIENCES OF THE MIND	Introduction	Lavater, Gall, and Spurzheim—From Physiognomical System of Dr. Gall and Spurzheim	Orson S. Fowler—From Fowler's Practical Phrenology	Thomas C. Upham—From Outlines of Imperfection and Disordered Action	POPULAR FICTION: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE SENSATION TALE	Introduction	Anonymous—Extracts from Gosschen's Diary	Anonymous—The Buried Alive	William Maginn—The Man in the Bell	THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY	Introduction	James E. Heath—Southern Literature	Anonymous—Slavery	Edgar Allan Poe—To Beverley Tucker (May 2, 1836)	J. V. Ridgely—The Authorship of the Paulding-Drayton Review	Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 17, 1840)	Criticism	Introduction	Floyd Stovall—[Poetry, Imagination, and Cosmos: Poe's Debt to Coleridge]	Robert C. McLean—[Poetic Theory and Affective Poetry: Poe and George Tucker]	Richard Wilbur—The House of Poe	James W. Gargano—The Question of Poe's Narrators	Joseph J. Moldenhauer—Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision	Paul John Eakin—Poe's Sense of an Ending	Grace Farrell—The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym	Liahna Klenman Babener—The Shadow's Shadow: The Motif of the Double in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter"	Barton Levi St. Armand—The "Mysteries" of Edgar Poe: The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature	Joseph N. Riddel—The "Crypt" of Edgar Allan Poe	J. Gerald Kennedy—Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction	John Carlos Rowe—Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism	Terence Whalen—Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary	Nationalism	John T. Irwin—Detective Fiction as High Art: Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson on "The Purloined Letter"	Selected Bibliography
language: English
title: The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
titlecomplete: The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
genres: Short Stories, Essays, Poetry, Gothic, Literature, Horror, Classic Literature, Classics, Mystery, Fiction
ratings_count: 1556
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company