"The fall of the house of Usher" : a master text for (Poe's) American Gothic

Authors

  • Marita Nadal University of Zaragoza

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.141

Keywords:

American Gothic, romance, allegory, abstraction, personification, darkness, race, the return of the repressed, unreadable signifiers

Abstract

This paper analyses a selection of Poe’s fiction taking as a point of departure the contentions of critics such as Hillis Miller and Eric Savoy on the characteristics of American Gothic. The paper starts with a discussion of these features, which “The Fall of the House of Usher” epitomizes. After a revision of “Usher”, the paper explores other Poe works, showing that the elements that make this narrative a master text for the history of American Gothic are somehow anticipated in Poe’s previous tales, like “Berenice” and “Ligeia”, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and peculiarly reflected in the late tale of detection “The Purloined Letter”.

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Published

29-05-2009

How to Cite

Nadal, M. (2009). "The fall of the house of Usher" : a master text for (Poe’s) American Gothic. Journal of English Studies, 7, 55–70. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.141

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