Міністерство  освіти і науки України

      Головне управління освіти і науки

      Харківської обласної державної адміністрації

      Харківський гуманітарно-педагогічний інститут 

      Кафедра іноземної філології 
 
 

      «Edgar Allan Poe and his detective tradition» 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Курсова робота

з курсу: «Американська література»

студентки 511-ан групи

факультету  іноземної філології

Юхно  Тетяни Анатоліївни

Науковий  керівник:

Доктор  педагогічних наук, професор

Чистякова А. Б. 
 

Харків

2010

      Content: 

Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3

Part 1……………………………………………………………………………….4

1. The General overview of the American Literature of the first half of the XIX century………………………………………………………………………...……4
1. American Revolution and its influence upon the American literature…….4
2. Outstanding authors of the first half of the XIX century………………….5
2. Edgar Allan Poe as the creator of detective stories…………………………...9
1. The definition of the “detective story”…………………………………….9
2. Poe as the Father of Detective Fiction…………………………………....10
3. The most famous detective stories of the author…………………………….14
1. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”……………………………………….14
2. "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"…………………………………………...16
3. “The Purloined Letter”…………………………………………………...18
4. Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution into the further development of the detective tradition…………………………………………………………………………....19

Conclusions...……………………………………………………………………..21

References………………………………………………………………………...23 
 
 
 
 

Introduction

      Edgar Allan Poe’s importance as a detective writer may be seen in his pioneering contributions to the genre, in the rich variety, meaning, and significance of his stories, and in their influence on writers the world over. And Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin, a private detective, became the model for many later fictional detectives.

     Relevance of the study. The great contribution made by Edgar Allan Poe in the formation of American literature can not be overemphasized. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the first American detective writers, whose influence is be traced in American literature and European in modern times. His stories are read by children, probed with the tools of psychoanalysis by critics, and transformed into films. Therefore, his creative activity is worth of paying attention to and the given theme is actual for investigation.

       The objects of study are Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories.

       Subject of research - characteristic features and artistic peculiarities of Poe’s detectives.

       The aim of work. To analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories; to investigate and to show their characteristic features artistic peculiarities.

       Research objectives.

       1. To investigate American Literature of the first half of the XIX century and to allocate main authors of that time.

       2. To consider Edgar Allan Poe as the creator of the detective fiction. 

       3. To analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories as the prototype for many future fictional detectives.

      The hypothesis of the study. Edgar Allan Poe deserves to be named “the father of the detective story”. He created so much that is of importance in the field – literally creating the template for all of detective fiction to follow. 
 
 

Part I

1. The General overview of the American Literature of the first half of the XIX century

 

1.   American Revolution and its influence upon the American literature

 

      The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.

      American books were harshly reviewed in England. Americans were painfully aware of their excessive dependence on English literary models. The search for a native literature became a national obsession. As one American magazine editor wrote, around 1816, "Dependence is a state of degradation fraught with disgrace, and to be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can ourselves produce is to add to the crime of indolence the weakness of stupidity". [2]

      Cultural revolutions, unlike military revolutions, cannot be successfully imposed but must grow from the soil of shared experience. Revolutions are expressions of the heart of the people; they grow gradually out of new sensibilities and wealth of experience. It would take 50 years of accumulated history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of American writers: Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and others. America's literary independence was slowed by a lingering identification with England, an excessive imitation of English or classical literary models, and difficult economic and political conditions that hampered publishing.

      Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine patriotism, were of necessity self-conscious, and they could never find roots in their American sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolutionary generation had been born English, had grown to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated English modes of thought and English fashions in dress and behavior. Their parents and grandparents were English (or European), as were all their friends. Added to this, American awareness of literary fashion still lagged behind the English, and this time lag intensified American imitation. [3]

      As if in response, four American authors of very respectable stature appeared: William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe. They wrote in many prose genres, initiated new forms, and found new ways to make a living through literature. With them, American literature began to be read and appreciated in the United States and abroad. 

2. Outstanding authors of the first half of the XIX century.

 

      After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development. Irving, often considered the first writer to develop a unique American style [citation needed] (although this has been debated) wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the well-known satire A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Bryant wrote early romantic and nature-inspired poetry, which evolved away from their European origins. In 1832, Poe began writing short stories – including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo (which includes The Last of the Mohicans) were popular both in the new country and abroad. [2]

      Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of his poem "Thanatopsis" (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was written under the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving. [8; 22]

      Irving, youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807-08), which took off the foibles of Manhattan's citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by "Diedrich Knickerbocker", a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the Old Dutch families. Irving's models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch Book (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.

      No writer was as successful as Irving at humanizing the land, endowing it with a name and a face and a set of legends. The story of "Rip Van Winkle", who slept for 20 years, waking to find the colonies had become independent, eventually became folklore. It was adapted for the stage, went into the oral tradition, and was gradually accepted as authentic American legend by generations of Americans.

      Irving discovered and helped satisfy the raw new nation's sense of history. His numerous works may be seen as his devoted attempts to build the new nation's soul by recreating history and giving it living, breathing, imaginative life. For subjects, he chose the most dramatic aspects of American history: the discovery of the New World, the first president and national hero, and the westward exploration. His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of New York (1809) under the Dutch, ostensibly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker (hence the name of Irving's friends and New York writers of the day, the "Knickerbocker School"). [8; 23]

      James Fennimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott's "Waverley" novels, he did his best work in the "Leatherstocking tales" (1823-41), a five-volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well.

      James Fenimore Cooper, like Irving, evoked a sense of the past and gave it a local habitation and a name. In Cooper, though, one finds the powerful myth of a golden age and the poignance of its loss. While Irving and other American writers before and after him scoured Europe in search of its legends, castles, and great themes, Cooper grasped the essential myth of America: that it was timeless, like the wilderness. American history was a trespass on the eternal; European history in America was a reenactment of the fall in the Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm of nature was glimpsed only in the act of destroying it: The wilderness disappeared in front of American eyes, vanishing before the oncoming pioneers like a mirage. This is Cooper's basic tragic vision of the ironic destruction of the wilderness, the new Eden that had attracted the colonists in the first place. [8; 40]

      Cooper accepted the American condition while Irving did not. Irving addressed the American setting as a European might have -- by importing and adapting European legends, culture, and history. Cooper took the process a step farther. He created American settings and new, distinctively American characters and themes. He was the first to sound the recurring tragic note in American fiction.

      Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day.

      His masterpieces of terror: "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), and others – were written according to a carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with "The Raven" (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country. [8; 42]

      Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the overcivilized yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art. 
 
 
 
 
 

2. Edgar Allan Poe as the creator of detective stories

 

1. The definition of the “detective story”

 

      Detective story – is a type of mystery story that features a private detective or a police officer as the prime solver of a crime — usually a murder case. The detective is the main protagonist, through whom the story is told either as a first-person narrator or in the third person as portrayed by the author. The detective interrogates the suspects, ferrets out the clues, and tracks down the murderer. To play fair, the detective shares all the clues with the reader but withholds their significance until the end. [9]

      The thrust of the detective’s investigation is based on motive, opportunity, and means, and he or she arrives at the solution by eliminating those suspects who do not fulfill these criteria. To make the case difficult for the detective and interesting to the reader, the author puts complications in the detective’s way: several suspects, additional murders, red herrings, and, often, threats of violence. Only at the end does the detective unmask the culprit, explain the plot, and present the deductive reasoning that he used in solving the case.

      The detective story, often called a whodunit, did not spring into being in this form. Rather, it evolved, early in the 20th century, from stories about detectives in which the reader was not a participant, but a witness, so to speak, looking over the detective’s shoulder.

      The traditional elements of the detective story are:

      (1) the seemingly perfect crime;

      (2) the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points;

      (3) the bungling of dim-witted police;

      (4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective;

      (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained. [7]

      Detective story frequently operate on the principle that superficially convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also axiomatic that the clues from which a logical solution to the problem can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at exactly the same time that the sleuth receives them and that the sleuth deduce the solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues.

      The first detective story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in April 1841. Poe's fictional French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, appeared in two other stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1845) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). The detective story soon expanded to novel length. 

      

2.     Poe – the father of detectives

 

      E. A. Poe became the father of modern day detective stories by introducing Dupin in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as the first detective to use analytical and imaginative reasoning to solve the mystery and will create a guideline for all detective stories to come. The word "detective" was not in existence until Poe's writings. Mysteries had existed but never such a story that used a "detector" or placed such emphasis upon analysis versus trial and error. The vivid painting of the scene of the crime as well as the crime itself was likewise never done in writings until Poe. [1]

      Dupin made his born in April 1841, when Graham’s Magazine published Poe’s classic horror story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The detective appeared thereafter in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842–43), “The Purloined Letter” (1845).

      In just three stories, Poe created the amateur detective and his narrator friend, the locked-room mystery, the talented but eccentric amateur sleuth outwitting the official police force, what Haycraft calls the "catalogue of minutia," interviews with witnesses, the first fictional case of an animal committing a perceived murder, the first armchair detective, the first fictional case which claimed to solve a real murder mystery previously unsolved by police, the concept of hiding something in plain sight so that it is overlooked by everyone who is searching for it, scattering of false clues by the criminal, accusing someone unjustly, the concept of "ratiocination", solution and explanation by the detective, and more. Other stories by Poe introduced cryptic ciphers, surveillance, the least-likely person theme (in one case, the narrator of the story is the murderer!), and other ingredients that have spiced up many a recipe for a crime story. [12]