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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page paper discussing two stories of Poe's : 'Ligeia,' and 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' and Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Minister's Black Veil' in light of the Gothic tradition of the nineteenth century. The paper concludes that Poe's stories are Gothics and Hawthorne's is not because Hawthorne is trying to influence the reader's conscious mind through parable and Poe is going for the unconscious mind through fear. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Ligeia1.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
half-believe is hidden just beneath the surface of the most conventional lives. In this paper we will discuss the Gothic in light of two of Poes stories, "Ligeia", and "The
Fall of the House of Usher," and contrast Poes story with a somewhat dark tale of Nathaniel Hawthornes, "The Ministers Black Veil." We will also analyze why Poes stories are
Gothics and Hawthornes is not. Critic Mark Edmunson calls Gothic literature "the art of haunting", adding that "Gothic shows that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed,
that the present is in thrall to the past. All are guilty; all will, in time, pay the price. And Gothic should also possess the reader, scare him, so he
can think of nothing else. He has to read it--or see it--again and again to achieve some peace." Edmunson quotes Chris Baldick, author of a splendid book on the Frankenstein
myth, that Gothic literature "should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an
impression of sickening descent into disintegration" (Edmunson, p. 48). The Gothic imagination, in short, is antithetical to hardy American optimism. A nation of ideals, America has also been, not surprisingly,
a nation of disillusionment, and we often find some sort of sympathetic resonance in tales of the dark and unholy. And the first prominent American exponent of the Gothic was
Edgar Allen Poe. In this role Poe stands in opposition to such prophets of intellectual freedom and self-reliance as Ralph Waldo Emerson. So what characterizes a Gothic story, and
how do our three stories fit into this genre? Aside from sheer fright value, there are some common denominators. Most Gothic tales feature an exotic locale of some sort, typically
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