Essays on American Literature

In The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe writes of a sickly brother and sister that live in an old town. The story is scary and focuses on two similar levels. One of the levels of scariness is the psychological aspect of…

In this work, Edgar Allen Poe employs various gothic components to create a “scary story”. The narrator received a letter from his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher to visit him because he was ill. The narrator came to visit and found a very “creepy” house. It…

As he does with such a significant number of his short stories, Poe introduces ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ with a pertinent cited section: ‘Child Coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne’. From a lyric by French verse artist…

On an autumn day, our storyteller goes the House of Usher, seeing which renders the day significantly gloomier than some time recently. He takes looks of the house’s ‘eye-like windows’ and feels a ‘despondency of the soul’ that is practically identical just to the way…

The Usher mansion is transformed into the lifeless counterpart of the inhabitants. It is a symbol and a valuable character that makes the transition between the realm of the dead and that of the living creatures; it symbolizes death and decomposition. Its walls are encapsulating…

Without hesitation, everyone can agree that winter’s beauty is unparalleled. However, with the rise of transcendentalism in early poetry, the season of winter was painted with a much darker hue, altering the perspective of winter in literature forever. As the snow gradually falls outside, the…

Sanctimonious hypocrisy, causing one to commit an even greater wrong than the one they seek vengeance for, consumes them with the desire for revenge. Caused by the desire to seek vengeance and punish someone who has caused internal or external pain to one or someone…

In the two works, “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving and “Thanatopsis” by William Bryant, nature and mankind are two of the principal subjects, like many other works created during the romantic period. In both works, nature and mankind’s desire to be in communion with…

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving is an anti-feminist text because of the symbolism between the Dame and Britain, and her unimportance as a character. In the story, Rip Van Winkle falls asleep for 20 years and misses the American Revolution. The Revolution is arguably…

In this story, the author provides the United States of America an overall read on a lifetime of a village within the Catskill mountains space. Rip Van Winkle is the central character of this story. Irving Washington builds Rip with a quite strange characteristic that…