COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PROSE BY EDGAR ALLAN POE AND ANTUN GUSTAV MATOS IN THE CONTEXT OF SHORT STORIES CRNI MACAK AND MIS

Antun Gustav Matos is one of the most significant writers of the Croatian Literary Modernism. Part of his literary work reflects the influence of symbolism where he paid special attention to the ways of solving ontological crisis. Besides prevailing symbolism motives, one part of his short stories also contains elements of fantastic prose genre. Edgar Allan Poe was a famous literate who was writing during the age of Romantic style. His works contain elements of fantastic genre with especially emphasized feelings of creeps. Because of that, he is recognized as a forerunner of symbolism. Matos was familiar with literary and theoretical work by Edgar Allan Poe. That is especially evident in the context of symbolism prose by Matos. The aim of this paper is to prove the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on the prose by Antun Gustav Matos, referring to the most important theoretical foundations of symbolism as well as particularities of these two authors’ poetics. Thus the paper will analyze short stories Mis (1899) and Crni macak (1849) taking into consideration motivation preoccupation of the two authors as well as narrative structures of the texts.