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zoobyshoe
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Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of all modern detective fiction and I see from reading more of his work that his detective fiction arose from his own interest in debunking mysteries and in unraveling misconceptions.
Previously I supposed he had some fascination with the paranormal that could be construed as partial belief, or at least open mindedness about it, but the more I find out about him, it's looking more like he composed his tales much more cold bloodedly with a specific eye to exploiting both "the popular and the critical taste".
http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm
You can see from that essay that writing was a very disciplined, logical procedure in his mind, aimed at satisfying "the popular and the critical taste". He was well educated in math and physics (as far as physics went in his day) and was extremely appreciative of both disciplines for their basis in logic. (He alludes to Newtonian mechanics fairly often in his stories as well as the mathematics of probability.) Effective literature emerges, he maintains, from the cold-blooded analysis, and manipulation of, literary effects. That whole essay is dedicated to that proposition because Poe liked dispelling misconceptions, dissecting hoaxes, deconstructing mysteries, including even the artistic process. He eschews any bunk about artists "discovering themselves", or clap-trap about "inner journeys".
He was fascinated by hoaxes, mysteries, and codes. He wrote a rather long debunking of a then well known chess-playing machine:
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/2189/
And his story The Mystery of Marie Roget was a debunking of popular rumors that sprang up around the actual unsolved murder of a NY shop girl.
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/Early19thCentury/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTExMzkyMQ==
His treasure hunting story,The Gold Bug revolves around a substitution code and was for a long time most people's introduction to the notion of a secret code, and he wrote a Valentine poem encoding the recipients name into it.
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-goldbug.htm
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-valentine/
(To decode the name of the recipient take the first letter of the first line, second letter of the second line, third letter of the third line, and so on.)
A few of his stories are tales of murder as told by the murderer. I'd be interested in reading his step by step explanation of what he was up to with those if such exists.
Anyway, reading him over the past year, I've changed my impression that he must have been an essentially mystical-thinking person to feeling he would probably enjoy PF.
Previously I supposed he had some fascination with the paranormal that could be construed as partial belief, or at least open mindedness about it, but the more I find out about him, it's looking more like he composed his tales much more cold bloodedly with a specific eye to exploiting both "the popular and the critical taste".
...it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select “The Raven,” as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm
You can see from that essay that writing was a very disciplined, logical procedure in his mind, aimed at satisfying "the popular and the critical taste". He was well educated in math and physics (as far as physics went in his day) and was extremely appreciative of both disciplines for their basis in logic. (He alludes to Newtonian mechanics fairly often in his stories as well as the mathematics of probability.) Effective literature emerges, he maintains, from the cold-blooded analysis, and manipulation of, literary effects. That whole essay is dedicated to that proposition because Poe liked dispelling misconceptions, dissecting hoaxes, deconstructing mysteries, including even the artistic process. He eschews any bunk about artists "discovering themselves", or clap-trap about "inner journeys".
He was fascinated by hoaxes, mysteries, and codes. He wrote a rather long debunking of a then well known chess-playing machine:
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/2189/
And his story The Mystery of Marie Roget was a debunking of popular rumors that sprang up around the actual unsolved murder of a NY shop girl.
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/Early19thCentury/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTExMzkyMQ==
His treasure hunting story,The Gold Bug revolves around a substitution code and was for a long time most people's introduction to the notion of a secret code, and he wrote a Valentine poem encoding the recipients name into it.
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-goldbug.htm
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-valentine/
(To decode the name of the recipient take the first letter of the first line, second letter of the second line, third letter of the third line, and so on.)
A few of his stories are tales of murder as told by the murderer. I'd be interested in reading his step by step explanation of what he was up to with those if such exists.
Anyway, reading him over the past year, I've changed my impression that he must have been an essentially mystical-thinking person to feeling he would probably enjoy PF.
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