Poe and the Grotesque: A Bibliography, 1695-1965
Lewis A. Lawson
No name seems more frequently linked with the grotesque than that of Edgar Allan Poe. Yet despite the frequency of such incidental reference, there has been little critical investigation of the relationship, and what little there has been is confusing. The goal of this bibliography is to provide the basic sources for any serious treatment of the subject. Each of the four bibliographies should be viewed as suggestive, not definitive.
I. Possible sources for Poe's concept of "grotesque."
| 1695 | ... | Dryden, John. "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting."
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| 1773 | Bailey, Nathan. Universal Etymological Dictionary.
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| 1788 | Flögel, Karl Friedrich. Geschichte des
Grotesk-Komischen.
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| 1790 | Stieglitz, C. W. Über den Gebrauch der
Grotesken und Arabesken.
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| 1791 | Fiorillo, Johann Dominicus. Über die
Grotesken.
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| 1800 | Schlegel, Friedrich. Gespräch über
die Poesie.
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| 1805 | Knight, Richard Payne. An Analytical Inquiry
into the Principles of Taste.
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| 1818 | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "On the Distinctions
of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous; The Nature and Constituents
of Humor: — Rabelais — Swift — Sterne."
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| 1820 | Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the Dramatic
Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.
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| 1827 | Hugo, Victor. Preface to Cromwell.
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| 1827 | Anonymous. "The Continuation of Vivian Grey,"
New Monthly Magazine, XIX (April 1827), 297-304.
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| 1827 | Scott, Sir Walter. "On the Supernatural in Fictitious
Composition; and particularly in the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann,"
Foreign Quarterly Review, July 1827. [See Gustav Gruener, "Notes
on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann upon Edgar Allan Poe," PMLA,
XIX (1904), 1-25; Palmer Cobb, "The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on Edgar
Allan Poe," SP, III (1908), 1-104.]
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| 1838 | H., C. Review-essay on Tom Hood. Westminster
Review, XXXI (April 1838), 62-76. [See Dewayne August Peterson, "Poe's
Grotesque Humor," Part IV of this bibliography.]
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There is no complete concordance to Poe's work; thus the following citations
of "grotesque," or a variant, whether a critical term or one of general
discourse, should be regarded as suggestive.
| 1834 | ... | Review of "Zinzendorff, and Other Poems."
["The conclusion of this is bathetic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque."
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New
York: AMS Press, 1965), VIII, 132.]
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| 1835 | Letter to T. W. White. ["In the ludicrous heightened
into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated
into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical."
The Letters of Edgar |
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| 1835 | Letter to Beverly Tucker. ["Moreover — are you
sure Jeffrey was never jocular or frivolous in his critical opinions?
I think I can call to mind some of the purest grotesque in his Reviews
— downright horse laughter." Ostrom, I, 77.]
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| 1836 | Review of Drake and Halleck. ["But there was,
at all events, a shadow of excuse, and a slight basis of reason for a subserviency
so grotesque." Harrison, VIII, 276. "In the second stanza, 'the thunder-drum
of Heaven' is bathetic and grotesque in the highest degree — a commingling
of the most sublime music of Heaven with the most utterly contemptible
and commonplace of Earth." Harrison, VIII, 306.]
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| 1836 | Review of The Book of Gems. ["And this
quaintness and grotesqueness are, as we have elsewhere endeavored to show,
very powerful, and if well managed, very admissible adjuncts to Ideality."
Harrison, IX, 94; see also 96.]
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| 1839 | Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (dated
1840). [In the Preface Poe merely wrote, "The epithets 'Grotesque' and
'Arabesque' will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent
tenor of the tales here published." Harrison, I, 150.]
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| 1841 | "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." ["If now, in
addition to all these things, you have properly reflected upon the odd
disorder of the chamber, we have gone so far as to combine the ideas of
an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery
without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity,
and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of many nations, and devoid
of all distinct or intelligible syllabification." Harrison, IV, 180-181.]
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| 1842 | "The Masque of the Red Death." ["Be sure they
were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm
— much of what has been since seen in 'Hernani.' There were arabesque figures
with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such
as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton,
much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little
of that which might have excited disgust." Harrison, IV, 254.]
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| 1845 | Review of Tom Hood. ["But his true element was
a very rare and ethereal class of humor, in which the mere pun
was left altogether out of sight, or took the character of the richest
grotesquerie, impressing the imaginative reader with very remarkable
force, as if by a new phase of the ideal. It is in this species of brilliant
grotesquerie, uttered with a rushing abandon which wonderfully
aided its effect, that Hood's marked originality of manner consisted; and
it is this which fairly entitles him, at times, to the epithet 'great;'
— we say fairly so entities him; for that undeniably may be considered
great — (of whatever seeming littleness in itself ) which has the
capability of producing intense emotion in the minds of those who are themselves
undeniably great." Harrison, XII, 215-216.]
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| 1845 | Review of Tom Hood. ["Its effect arises from
that grotesquerie which, in our previous article, we referred to
the vivid Fancy of the author, impelled by hypochondriasis: — but 'The
Song of the Shirt' has scarcely a claim to the title of poem." Harrison,
XII, 234.]
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| 1849 | Marginalia: Text, Southern Literary Messenger,
September 1849. [Essentially a reprinting of the first review (above)
of Tom Hood, 1845. Harrison, XVI, 178.]
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Little attention has been given to Poe's understanding of "grotesque"
as a critical term. I attempted to establish Poe's meaning in "Poe's Conception
of the Grotesque," Mississippi Quarterly, XIX (Fall 1966), 200-205,
as "a form of the ideal, as a result of pure imagination . . . and as a
source of beauty," arguing that when Poe entitled his collection of stories
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
| 1850 | ... | Peck, G. W. "The Works of Edgar A. Poe," American
Whig Review, XI (March 1850), 301-315. [Speaking of Poe's fancy, Peck
wrote, "Take its pictures altogether, and they belong to a new school of
grotesque diablerie. They are original in their gloom, their occasional
humor, their peculiar picturesqueness, their style, and their construction
and machinery" (pp. 307-308).]
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| 1854 | [Swinton, William]. "Novels: Their Meaning and
Mission," Putnam's Magazine, IV (October 1854), 389-396. ["Even
as in the individual, the fancy precedes, in relation of time, the imagination;
so in the adolescence of a national literature, we have the grotesque and
arabesque before the lofty idealistic" (p. 393).]
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| 1860 | Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics,
intro. Oral Sumner Coad (1949). [Relying upon Ruskin's discussions
of the grotesque, Mrs. Whitman says as much about Poe's use of the grotesque
as has been said.]
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| 1946 | Kelly, Sr. M. Olive, I. H. M. "The Mechanics
of the Grotesque and Arabesque in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe." Unpub.
Master's Thesis. Duquesne University.
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| 1962 | Peterson, Dewayne August. "Poe's Grotesque Humor."
Unpub. Doctoral Diss. Duke University.
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These citations may or may not incidentally discuss Poe. For the sake
of brevity many critics who refer to the grotesque only in passing are
not cited.
| 1853 | ... | Ruskin, John. Stones of Venice, II, III.
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| 1855 | Baudelaire, Charles. "De L'essence du Rire et
generalement du Comique dans les Arts plastiques," Le Portefeuille.
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| 1856 | Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, II, IV.
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| 1864 | Bagehot, Walter. "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning;
or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry," collected in Literary
Studies (1879).
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| 1875 | Wright, Thomas. A History of Caricature and
the Grotesque.
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| 1898 | Bray, Jeremiah. A History of English Critical
Terms.
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| 1933 | Mann, Thomas. "Conrad's 'The Secret Agent',"
Past Masters.
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| 1937 | Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History.
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| 1857 | Kayser, Wolfgang. Das Groteske: seine Gestaltung
in Malerei und Dichtung.
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| 1959 | O'Connor, William Van. "The Grotesque in Modern
American Fiction," reprinted in The Grotesque: An American Genre (1963).
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| 1963 | Jennings, Lee B. The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects
of the Grotesque Post-Romantic Prose.
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| 1964 | Barasch, Frances K. "The 'Grotesque': Its History
as a Literary Term." Unpub. Doctoral Diss. New York University.
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| 1964 | Ciancio, Ralph A. "The Grotesque in Modern American
Fiction." Unpub. Doctoral Diss. University of Pittsburgh.
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| 1964 | Lawson Lewis A. "The Grotesque in Recent Southern
Fiction." Unpub. Doctoral Diss. University of Wisconsin.
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| 1965 | Claborough, Arthur. The Grotesque in English
Literature.
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[S:1 - PSDR, 1968]