Doug Bradley
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English
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First published in a 1839 edition of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, The Fall of the House of Usher is the story of the declining physical and psychological health of the residents of the House of Usher-and the way in which the house itself reflects that. Gothic in theme and style, the story is an exemplar of Poe's philosophy of composition, which dictates that literary works should be short, methodological, and have a unity of effect wherein all the...
2) Ligeia
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English
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The unnamed narrator describes the qualities of Ligeia, a beautiful, passionate and intellectual woman, raven-haired and dark-eyed, that he thinks he remembers meeting "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine." He is unable to recall anything about the history of Ligeia, including her family's name, but remembers her beautiful appearance. Her beauty, however, is not conventional. He describes her as emaciated, with some "strangeness." He describes...
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The first-person unnamed narrator describes his struggle with "attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term "catalepsy", a condition where he randomly falls into a death-like trance. This leads to his fear of being buried alive. He emphasises his fear by mentioning several people who have been buried alive. In the first case, the tragic accident was only discovered much later, when the victim's crypt was reopened. In others,...
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English
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The story follows a man of noble descent who calls himself William Wilson because, although denouncing his past, he does not accept responsibilities blame for his actions, saying that "man was never thus [...] tempted before". After several paragraphs, the narration then segues into a description of Wilson's boyhood, which was spent in a school "in a misty-looking village of England." William meets another boy in his school who shared the same name,...
Author
Language
English
Description
MS. Found In A Bottle is an adventure short story by Edgar Allan Poe that first appeared in the May 1833 edition of Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The plot follows an unnamed narrator at sea who finds himself in a series of harrowing circumstances. As he nears his own disastrous death while his ship drives ever southward, he writes an "MS.", or manuscript, telling of his adventures which he casts into the sea. Some critics believe the story was meant...