Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,3, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: The current work seeks to portray women's characters as they are depicted in the short stories “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Oval Portrait” (1842). There seems to be a connection between Poe's mother, whom he did not really know, his foster mother and the premature death of his wife with Ligeia's portrayal. The second story follows Poe's personal view that the most poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman. Approaches to questions such as who are these women and what do they symbolise; what position do they have in the narrator's life and how does their presence or absence affect his feelings within the sequence of events; and what interpretations can we offer with regard to the Gothic background and Poe's life will be offered.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Literature - Modern Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Göttingen (Philosophische Fakultät), course: Beyond Principle and Philosophy: Edgar Allan Poe as an American Author, language: English, abstract: In this paper, it will be argued that this emphasis on visual sensations is directly related to the violence against women as it exposes the murderers’ motives and drives, their course of action as well as their attempt to then distort the reader’s view of the truth in order to cover their involvement. For the discussion of this thesis Poe’s short stories “The Oval Portrait,” “Morella”, “Berenice” and especially “Ligeia” will be considered. Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories deal with a fixation on dying women as he famously states in “The Philosophy of Composition: “death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (1621). The death of those women is often violent as they are murdered by a male character as a result of an “emotional estrangement between the male protagonist and a fated female” (Kennedy 118). Interestingly, the characters and the circumstances surrounding those deaths are described with an emphasis on the “lexical field of sight” (Marín-Ruiz 58) so that already “a cursory exposure to Poe’s fiction leaves a strong impression of his recurrent emphasis on the eye” (Scheick 80). Detailed accounts of eyes, glances, gazes and vision keep reappearing in the selected stories, so that sight becomes one of the key elements of the tales.

Perhaps fitting for a horror short story, the devil is in the details in Poe’s "The Oval Portrait" (1842). A benighted traveller finds shelter in an abandoned mansion in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. Inside he gets absorbed by a stunning painting and decides to delve into its origins with the help from a book he finds on a pillow. The story revolves around the complex and often tragic relationship between life and art. As per usual Poe can’t help himself to play with layers, and most of the story is told as an embedded narrative. The intense emotional and psychological depths of the narrator’s infatuation with the portrait and the enticing volume that helps to shed a light on the painting make this short story another fascinating and haunting and Poesque tale which succinctly glorifies the immortality of art. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American poet, author, and literary critic. Most famous for his poetry, short stories, and tales of the supernatural, mysterious, and macabre, he is also regarded as the inventor of the detective genre and a contributor to the emergence of science fiction, dark romanticism, and weird fiction. His most famous works include "The Raven" (1945), "The Black Cat" (1943), and "The Gold-Bug" (1843).

A collection of over 70 portraits and daguerreotypes representing all of the known authentic likenesses of Edgar Allen Poe, as well as many of the derivative portraits and engravings produced since the poet's death in 1849.

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