“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), is the first detective story written by Edgar Allan Poe and is considered to be the first-ever story of the detective genre, In this fictional short-story, the Paris Police Chief (the Prefect) asks Poe’s Detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the violent murder of a mother and daughter. Dupin first explains ratiocination and how he might apply it to solving crimes. The tale opens with Dupin proclaiming, “The mental features discoursed as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.” He regards the unraveling of mysteries as one of ...
literature
Poe’s Tales of Detective Fiction
MURRAY ELLISON–Urban crime was an area of acute interest in the nineteenth century in America and Europe because the public feared that it was rampant and out of the control of the police. To respond to this concern, Poe demonstrates increasingly complex aspects of ratiocination in each of his three Auguste C. Dupin detective-based tales. He chose Paris, France for these tales because it had one of the first professional police forces. See photo of a French police officer above (myartprints.co.uk).
The term, ratiocination, is not listed in most dictionaries; however, it may be defined by ...
Mellonta Tauta: An Imaginary Journey
Extracted from Dr. Murray Ellison’s MA Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015©
In Poe’s Imaginary Journey, “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), the narrator, Pundit, embarks on a balloon trip to outer space in the year of 2848 and writes a letter narrating the details of his journey.
The name that Poe gives his narrator suggests that he is a pundit, a knower of sublime truth. However, Poe may have selected his character’s name because he delivers puns or a satiric presentation of science fiction. Pundit records his adventures in a journal that is presumed to ...
Poe Has “Some Words With A Mummy”
An excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 MA Thesis from Virginia Commonwealth University on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©
Poe’s tale, “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) provides one of the most revealing views about the low value he places in nineteenth-century science. Although the unnamed narrator of this short story, who also speaks in the voice of Mr. Poe, does not go anywhere special, he imagines that an ancient Egyptian Mummy is revived by an electro-voltaic shock to reflect on the relative values of ancient and nineteenth-century technologies, and is brought to his house in New York. This ...
