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A book by a well-known Russian scholar and literary critic Elvira P. Osipova is a collection of essays written by the author at different times and dedicated to the works of the most significant American writers of the 19–20th centuries. The researcher focuses on the problems of philosophical and social views of writers, the connection of their works with the sociocultural context, and their sense of the tradition of American Romanticism and its humanistic emphasis. The essays are presented in chronological order — from Edgar Allan Poe to the writers of the late 20th century, the principle that allows to trace the humanistic emphasis of American literature throughout its two century history.

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

Crime fiction originated in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of great positivistic confidence in thepotential of human knowledge. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are considered as the beginning of thegenre, and his character Auguste Dupin is the first modern literary detective. F. M. Dostoevsky did notwrite crime novels because the elements of the genre present in his novels participate in the constructionof a different kind. However, this paper will try to look in more details at the key differences betweenDostoevsky and the classical rules of crime fiction, on the example of the novel “Crime and Punishment”.A deeper understanding of these differences reveals the limits of the genre, while in Dostoevsky onecan recognize one of the early critiques of the fundamental principles and world picture that the genrerepresents.

The paper comments on our new translations of E.A. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843). The introductory section reviews retranslation theories since the birth of the so-called Retranslation Hypothesis. We consider Lawrence Venuti’s idea of retranslation as best fitting our strategy. According to his point of view, each retranslation is, in fact, a reinterpretation. Besides correcting or debating other translations of Poe, we preserved what we thought to be insightful and eloquent in them. Our major objective was to retain the cognitive obstacles, the contradictory meaning of Poe’s prose, rather than to avoid its ambiguity, discrepancies, and repetitiveness. The non-native reader’s verdict, his or her assessment of the narrators’ sanity at the moment of crime and the validity of their post-crime narratives, would largely depend on the translator’s effort to savor both gothic undertones and numerous indications of mental instability in Poe’s tales. Such indications allowed numerous critics to diagnose the narrators with a variety of mental disorders. Another goal of our translations was to savor a distinctiveness of Poe’s prose, its affectiveness – the diction and phrasing of the oral spontaneous speech of “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator and the penned account given in “The Black Cat”. We made it a point to preserve where possible the authorial syntax and punctuation i.e. the numerous dashes, as well as italicized words and phrases, in order to project a tone of voice and sketch the psychological contours of the characters, especially that of the first narrator, whose pathological reactions could be caused by external or delusory sensory overload.

This paper aims to examine the sensationalism of Blackwood’s Magazine as evident in Poe’s tale “A Predicament” and how Poe disengages from the tradition of Blackwoods. On the one hand, Poe conflates Psyche Zenobia’s adventure into a Gothic Cathedral with the Blackwood’s sensationalistic experience, which treats vehement sensations as the prime condition for stimulating the mind’s engagement with a spiritual vision of a world beyond the material world. On the other, Poe’s tale disengages itself from the tradition of Blackwood’s Magazine: Zenobia loses her sensations altogether in the quest for final knowledge and there is no return to her real life. This paper will further look at the mutilated/deformed body in Poe’s “A Predicament” as a body in pain, or without pain, through which the mind engages its imagination. It will also discuss how Poe, through Zenobia’s gaze and speculation upon a sublime cathedral, installs an aesthetic appreciation that distances an imaginary space from reality and facilitates self-mesmerism through which Zenobia is grounded in the earthly world, both physically and spiritually.

Przedmiotem analizy w niniejszym artykule są relacje ludzi i zwierząt w dwóch opowiadaniach Edgara Allana Poego: Zabójstwo przy rue Morgue i Czarny kot. Interesują mnie też role, jakie pisarz wyznacza do odegrania zwierzętom w swoich fabułach. Analizowane relacje ludzi i zwierząt charakteryzują się przede wszystkim przemocą i okrucieństwem. Okrucieństwo człowieka jest celowe i wiąże się z zaspokojeniem materialnych i psychicznych potrzeb, a jego podstawę filozoficzną stanowi szowinizm gatunkowy. Agresja zwierząt ma charakter bardziej przypadkowy i najczęściej wynika z samoobrony. Zwierzęta w badanych tekstach występują w roli morderców, ofiar i świadków zbrodni, a w pewnym sensie stają się też śledczymi doprowadzającymi do rozwiązania kryminalnych zagadek. Ta wielość funkcji, jakie mogą pełnić w fabułach, nie tylko wzbogaca kryminalne intrygi, ale też przypomina, że międzygatunkowe role nie są ukształtowane raz na zawsze i mogą w każdej chwili ulec odwróceniu. The aim of this article is to analyse human-animal relationships in two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in The Rue Morgue and The Black Cat. Its purpose is also to study the roles which the author assigns to animals in his plots. The most characteristic feature of humananimal relationships is violence and cruelty. People’s cruelty is intentional, connected with satisfying their material and mental needs and based on speciesism. Animals’ aggression is more accidental and mostly results from self-defence. In Poe’s works animals are murderers, victims as well as witnesses of crimes, and in a way they become also investigators solving detective puzzles. This multitude of functions that animals have in these stories not only enriches detective plots, but also reminds us that relations between species are not established once for all and can be reversed at any moment.

The keynote of the essay is proving the ironic and satirical nature of Poe’s only drama “Politian”. For the first time, the influence of Thomas Nashe (“The Unfortunate Traveler, or The Life of Jacke Wilton”, 1594) and Robert Burton (“The Anatomy of Melancholy”, 1621) was indicated. The essay also proves the original source of the unusual name Lalage for Edgar Allan Poe. It was not the Horace ode, as was commonly thought, but a specific epigram by Martial. The most competent researchers supposed the names of the characters were taken from an unidentified book on Italian Renaissance. The essay introduces an original issue instead — all the names were taken by Poe from the enological vocabulary, which includes the names of wines, and specific bottles, or were associated with the aesthetics of wine consumption, ascending to the classical literature (onomatopoeia).

Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on detective fiction writers has been so large that his fictional detective became the prototype for many later ones, most notably Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. The character of the amateur detective Chevalier Auguste Dupin is featured in three of his stories, also known as The Dupin Tales: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842-1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In these stories, Dupin solves various crime mysteries with the aid of his unnamed helper. The first tale is an example of a locked room mystery, the second portrays Dupin as an armchair detective, and the third introduces the motif of an unlikely perpetrator. All three stories show Dupin’s unique method of crime solving which strongly binds his observations and conclusions by the principle of ratiocination showing that no matter how extraordinary a crime is its solution always adheres to the principles of cold logic.