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Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies. "
On 28 August 1984, Josef Fritzl drugged his teenage daughter with ether and imprisoned her in an underground bunker behind eight locked doors. Over the following twenty-four years, he raped and abused her, never letting her or the children she bore him out of the dark, windowless cellar. Based on 150 new interviews with psychologists, neighbours, colleagues and friends who knew Fritzl, as well as the insight of his own chilling confession, Allan Hall reconstructs the monstrous personality behind this hideous crime. He exposes Josef Fritzl's dark past in Nazi Austria, his previous conviction as a rapist, the appalling conditions in which Elisabeth and her children were kept and her astonishingly brave conduct while held prisoner. Including exclusive photographs and previously unseen evidence, this is a truly heart-stopping record of one of the most elaborate and disturbing cases of abuse in modern times.
It's a busy year for the Queen - she has lots of important events to attend. Meanwhile, a little girl is wondering what knickers Her Majesty will choose to wear on a school visit! Will they be her 'at home' knickers - adorned with corgis - or her 'garden party' knickers, or perhaps her woolly Balmoral ones...? Both children and adults will love this very special and endearing insight into a child's imagination, from the best-selling author-illustrator of Father Christmas Needs A Wee and Jesus' Christmas Party. Recently, the Queen visited a nursery in Norfolk and enjoyed a display based on the book: "...just to make it special, there was one element that was not quite so traditional: pants. These were not just any pants, either. They were the Queen's Knickers, and at Dersingham Infant and Nursery School, in Norfolk, they were put on special display in honour of their royal visitor" ~ Valentine Low, The Times
“The Best of Edgar Allan Poe” are 11 of Poe’s most memorable short stories including those that introduced the detective and Gothic genres to the United States. These are the original Edgar Allan Poe stories with minor editing making them accessible to today’s readers. An analysis follows each story and a biography of Poe is included.
Edgar Allan Poe mastered a variety of literary forms over the course of his brief and turbulent career. As a storyteller, Poe defied convention by creating Gothic tales of mystery, horror and suspense that remain widely popular today. This collection demonstrates how Poe's experience of early nineteenth-century American life fueled his iconoclasm and shaped his literary legacy. Rather than provide critical explications of his writings, each essay explores one aspect of Poe's immediate environment, using pertinent writings - verse, fiction, reviews and essays - to suit. Examining his geographical, social and literary contexts, as well as those created by the publishing industry and advances in science and technology, the essays paint an unprecedented portrait of Poe's life and times. Written for a wide audience, the collection will offer scholars and students of American literature, historians and general readers new insight into Poe's rich and complex work.
Controversies abound in studies of Edgar Allan Poe. From the time of his death well into the twentieth century, partisans debated the issue of his character: was he an alcoholic? drug addict? pathological liar? necrophile? In the 1920s and 30s, psychoanalytic critics sought to divorce the study of Poe from Victorian moral concerns but in the process made scandalous claims by linking Poe's dream-like stories to his personality. The status of Poe's literary productions was similarly disputed; dismissed by the New Critics but championed by poets such as William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate. Recent scholars have debated the meaning and significance of Poe's representations of race, class, and ...
Edgar Allan Poe is today considered one of the greatest masters and most fascinating figures of the American literary world. However, an examination of Poe's essays and criticism throughout his prose publishing career (1831-1849) reveals that the author himself played a vital role in the creation and manipulation of his own reputation. During his twenties and thirties, Poe promoted his writing to magazine editors in the United States and in Europe through several strategies. He painted a Romantic and patriotic self-portrait in his fiery literary reviews, even as he played up his own connections, both real and imaginary, to literary celebrities including Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, George Gordon Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through recycling plots, atmosphere, and language (including his own) from American and British magazines, he built stories and essays which were linked in a complex network of references to each other and their author. Teachers and students alike will enjoy this single-volume treatment of Poe’s self-promotional tales and criticism.