Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Wuppertal, course: Seminar Literaturwissenschaft "Edgar Allan Poe", language: English, abstract: This seminar paper investigates the role of Poe in the history of the detective story as a genre. It tries to find out if Poe really is the inventor of detective fiction or if there had been any detective stories prior to his Dupin works. As a first step, this paper introduces to the characteristics of a typical detective story. It also informs about the current state of research about the origins of detective fiction and appoints compositions that are discussed in scientific productions to be ancestors of the detective genre. The last focus on this thesis is the adaption of the characteristics of a typical detective story to easily check if Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a real detective story. At the end of this seminar paper, the following questions should be answered: Has nobody ever written a detective story before or are there preforms that are related to detective stories? Is Edgar Allan Poe really the inventor of detective fiction? Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most famous American authors, who is especially famous for his over seventy short stories. He was a master of suspense and of the macabre and succeeded in many different types of literature such as horror, poetry, criticism, mystery, tales and sketches. Furthermore, many claim him to be the father of the detective story.

On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rog t."

Edgar Allan Poe has long been viewed as an artist who was hopelessly out of step with his time. But as Terence Whalen shows, America's most celebrated romantic outcast was in many ways the nation's most representative commercial writer. Whalen explores the antebellum literary environment in which Poe worked, an environment marked by economic conflict, political strife, and widespread foreboding over the rise of a mass audience. The book shows that the publishing industry, far from being a passive backdrop to writing, threatened to dominate all aspects of literary creation. Faced with financial hardship, Poe desperately sought to escape what he called "the magazine prison-house" and "the horrid laws of political economy." By placing Poe firmly in economic context, Whalen unfolds a new account of the relationship between literature and capitalism in an age of momentous social change. The book combines pathbreaking historical research with innovative literary theory. It includes the first fully-documented account of Poe's response to American slavery and the first exposé of his plot to falsify circulation figures. Whalen also provides a new explanation of Poe's ambivalence toward nationalism and exploration, a detailed inquiry into the conflict between cryptography and common knowledge, and a general theory of Poe's experiments with new literary forms such as the detective story. Finally, Whalen shows how these experiments are directly linked to the dawn of the information age. This book redefines Poe's place in American literature and casts new light on the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War.

The 'first detective' of fiction steps out 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' by Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered to be the first true detective story; also in this volume are the author's two other detective fiction classics featuring the same central character-'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' & 'The Purloined Letter.' The French detective who features in all three is Chevalier Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth who puts himself in the position of the criminal and then uses logical deduction to discover how a crime was committed. This is an opportunity for lovers of classic crime and detective fiction to own and read these important and groundbreaking mysteries in a single volume, available in paperback or hardback with dust jacket for collectors.

Provides articles covering children's literature from around the world as well as biographical and critical reviews of authors including Avi, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Anno Mitsumasa.

Here in one convenient book by a noted Sherlockian scholar is everything needed for the study and enjoyment of the Holmes canon: information on the stories and their publishing history; an assessment of a century of illustrators; a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a bibliography of his other writings; commentary on the films and plays about Sherlock Holmes; synopses of the stories and information about their characters; a survey of Victorian life and on the geography and social scene of 1895 London; and information on current Sherlockian organizations. A final section comments on the lasting appeal of Sherlock Holmes and what he means to generations of readers.

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.