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Synopsis
Edgar Allan Poe's eerie stories and poems continue to captivate readers to this day. He not only wrote such gothic classics as "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," he also lived a haunted life worthy of one of his tales. This volume features fascinating critical essays from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that offer a well-rounded historical look at Poe and his timeless works.
Children's Literature
Surely Chelsea House is not marketing this book for kids. It is a collection of academic papers previously published for an academic audience. They bear such titles as "Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language," and "Poe's Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales." One of my degrees is in English literature, but my eyes glaze over just reading these titles. That is not to say that the authors and their essays are not good. These are first-rate scholars. One of them, David S. Reynolds, published a marvelous adult biography entitled Walt Whitman's America some years ago. This collection of essays from Chelsea House was written originally for academic journals and--except for those eleven year olds who skipped high school and went directly to college--will not interest young readers. Even Harold Bloom's introduction, presumably written for this book, is not the least bit kid friendly.