Poe's Cryptographic Imagination - Part I
Murray Ellison | February 1, 2018
Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015.
Poe continued to demonstrate an interest in unlocking mysteries and secrets in several of the essays and newspaper columns he wrote on secret codes and cryptography. These popular weekly columns offered puzzles, in which readers were invited to propose solutions and suggest additional ones for use in subsequent editions. He then provided the solutions to the ciphers in subsequent issues. Once Poe introduced the topic, readers sent in hundreds ...
literature
Madwomen in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature has often used themes of women held back or locked up in rooms and attics while attempting to make valiant stands and statements in support of their rights to artistic and intellectual expression, and social equality. These ideas are thoroughly supported and explored in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s book, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University P, 1979), as well as in many other literary discussions of fictional works written during this period. Mary Shelly’s, Frankenstein, was one of the first examples in literature expressing this theme. In 1818, ...
Poe’s “Oval Portrait: and The Picture of Dorian Gray: the Artist, the Subject, and the Audience*
After reading Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), I was struck by how much his theme about the value of art resembled the one found in Poe’s 1842 short fictional work, “The Oval Portrait.” Both stories focus on the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the viewer, or, in the case of literature, the reader. In Poe’s story, the young artist is driven to paint the ultimate portrait of his beautiful new wife. His goal was to produce a masterpiece that would portray a symbol of youth and vitality that would last an eternity. Poe writes, “As a thing of art, nothing ...
The Critic Who Burned “Fairy-Land”
Editor Nathaniel Parker Willis once burned a manuscript of Poe's "Fairy-Land." That seems like pretty harsh treatment from a literary editor; and we wonder why such atmospheric lines as "Dim vales-and shadowy floods- / And cloudy-looking woods" might receive such severe critical feedback? The answer lies in comparing the poem we commonly know with its alternative publishing in Poe's anthology of poems in 1831.
It was no secret that Poe was always at work altering lines and switching words-"Fairy-Land" was no exception.
Our readers may be familiar with the classic verse, which reads,
Dim ...
