Mabbott, sometimes adopting editorial revisions made by Mabbott and in a few cases correcting his texts.

My texts for the critical essays and opinions—some of which appeared in Griswold’s edition—ultimately derive from the original periodical sources. These writings were not revised by Poe and so present few editorial problems. For the letters, I have relied on the texts established by John Ward Ostrom in the two-volume 1948 Harvard edition, used with permission of the Gordian Press, which now holds the copyright.

TALES

Poe considered the domain of the short prose tale less “elevated” than that of the poem but more extensive and thus more conducive to innovation. He noted that the author of a tale “may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought.” The seventy-odd narratives that he published between 1832 and 1849 represent a surprisingly diverse body of fiction marked by ongoing experimentation and compulsive revision. Throughout his career Poe continued to rewrite even his greatest stories; as late as 1848, for example, he was still recasting “Ligeia.” For the title of his first volume of stories, he used the terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” to characterize their “prevalent tenor,” the former connoting deformity or ugliness and the latter fantastic intricacy. He regarded his arabesque tales as more serious productions, “phantasy-pieces” associated unfairly by critics with “ ‘Germanism’ and gloom.” Elsewhere he identified “tales of ratiocination” (detection) and “tales of effect” (sensation) as notable varieties of prose fiction, having already produced key examples of both. Although he critically disparaged allegory, he ventured into that mode in such works as “William Wilson” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s experiments in short narrative also included prose poems, spiritualized dialogues, and landscape sketches. He purposely blurred the line between the expository essay and the tale, between fact and fiction, in both “The Premature Burial” and “The Imp of the Perverse.” Essays such as “The Philosophy of Furniture” have sometimes been included among his tales, as have certain anecdotal reviews. Some of the articles that he composed to accompany magazine illustrations can likewise stand as independent tales.

Poe’s contributions to the tale as a literary genre include what is often regarded as the earliest theory of the short story form, four paragraphs (see pp. 534-36) tucked in a review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. His emphasis on “single effect” to intensify Gothic sensation led him to compose unified narratives in which orchestrated actions, images, and impressions culminate in a striking conclusion. In such tales as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the ending produces horror through shock: a sudden, final transformation exceeds expectation. If Poe did not originate surprise endings in the tale, he popularized and perfected them. More significantly, perhaps, he experimented with first-person narration and demonstrated the unsettling effect of an irrational, unreliable narrator, whose gradual, seemingly inadvertent betrayal of derangement undermines his own version of events while implying another. From “Berenice” to “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe created I-narrators who calmly and methodically disclose their mad compulsions, producing in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” his most penetrating analyses of psychopathic violence.

Poe also developed narrative prototypes for science fiction and the modern detective story. In an early work (“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”), he mixed science and satire to describe a balloon flight to the moon, but in a later, more plausible narrative (“The Balloon Hoax”), he embraced strict verisimilitude, extrapolating from scientific data to chronicle an imagined flight across the Atlantic. In “MS. Found in a Bottle” he traced an incredible voyage toward an immense vortex at the South Pole, and in his only full-length novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he incorporated (and plagiarized) scientific observations by actual South Sea explorers to “authenticate” a fantastic account of the polar region. Such scientific hoaxes as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” illustrate his credo that “the most vitally important point in fiction” is that of “earnestness or verisimilitude.” Poe used the semblance of reality to mystify his reader, serving up palpable fiction as positive fact. His fascination with criminology and investigative ratiocination, already apparent in “The Man of the Crowd,” yielded a trio of Parisian crime tales featuring C. August Dupin. Exercises in rational analysis also figure in “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Oblong Box.”

Although often associated with Gothic tales of terror, Poe devoted roughly half of his fiction to humor, producing satires, burlesques, parodies, and spoofs. Several of these pieces now seem too silly, affected, or topical to engage modern readers, and a handful appear to be dashed off for the sake of money alone. But certain comic narratives cleverly lampoon the sensational tale as popularized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and other farces mock national myths and illusions. Even supposedly serious tales include grimly comic touches: Poe’s love of jokes and puns gives manic hilarity to “The Cask of Amontillado,” and a similar sardonic humor animates “Hop-Frog,” while “The Premature Burial” ends with an unexpected joke on the reader.

During the first decade of his magazine career, Poe devoted himself almost exclusively to foreign subjects: predicaments or conflicts grounded in Old World places—Venice, London, Paris, and other locales vaguely European. Nearly all of his greatest tales—such as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “William Wilson”—impute to foreign settings a strangeness that supplements the uncanny effect of narrative events. From “Metzengerstein” through “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe portrayed a distinctly imaginary Europe marked by decadence, rivalry, tyranny, and corruption—by the very evils from which the young republic naively supposed itself liberated. But by the early 1840s, literary nationalism had made American subjects and materials nearly obligatory, and beginning with “The Gold-Bug,” set in South Carolina, Poe pragmatically shifted his fiction toward domestic scenes and situations.