Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Chapter 4 - Edgar Allan Poe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Poe and the aesthetics of the short story
As well as being one of its first and greatest American practitioners, Poe is the first theorist of the short story as a literary form. In his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) he elaborates his idea of the aesthetics of the short story, declaring that ‘the tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the wide domain of mere prose.’ He focuses above all on the tale's ability to achieve ‘unity of effect and impression’ which relies on the fact that it can be read ‘at one sitting’. The novel, by contrast, ‘deprives itself … of the immense force derivable from totality’ (italics in the original here and elsewhere in quotations from Poe). He continues with his ideal of the short story writer's practice:
A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invests such incidents – he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct and indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.[…]
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- The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story , pp. 31 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006