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.
With
Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds
Erin Forbes Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of Bristol
And
Tom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)
Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)
Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)
Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp’ (Modern Philology, 2016)
Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)
Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)
Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
The Hittites
A Christmas Carol
The May Fourth Movement
The Battle of Trafalgar
Plato's Gorgias
The Decadent Movement
William and Caroline Herschel
The Song of Roland
Corals
Iris Murdoch
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
The Manhattan Project
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Herodotus
The Evolution of Crocodiles
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Edward Gibbon
Booth's Life and Labour Survey
Kant's Copernican Revolution
The Interregnum
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Empire
History Extra podcast
The Rest Is History
Freakonomics Radio
The Daily Show: Ears Edition