Edgar Allan Poe

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe’s reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Bridget Bennett 4 episodes
  Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds
• Erin Forbes 2 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of Bristol
• Tom Wright 3 episodes
  Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex

Reading list

• Poe: A Life Cut Short
  Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2009) Google Books →
• Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision
  Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.) (Lehigh University Press, 2023) Google Books →
• Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction
  Joan Dayan (Oxford University Press, 1987) Google Books →
• 'Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp'
  Erin Forbes ( 2016)
• Edgar Allan Poe in Context
  Kevin J. Hayes (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe
  J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror'
  Jill Lepore ( April 20, 2009)
• Playing in the Dark
  Toni Morrison (Vintage, 1993) Google Books →
• The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
  Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys (Princeton University Press, 2020) Google Books →
• The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
  Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006) Google Books →
• The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe
  Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

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Programme ID: m001svfv

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001svfv

Auto-category: 810.9 (American literature in English)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 to 1849, is famous for his gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart.