Poe Analysis - The Cask of Amontillado: Historical Context

Authors Avatar by tedhughs (student)

The Cask of Amontillado: Historical Context

The Short Story

Although there have been stories as long as there have been people to tell them, many critics trace the beginnings of the short story as a genre of written prose literature consciously developed as an art form to the nineteenth century. Previously in the West there had been great ages of epics memorized or extemporized orally, narrative poetry, drama, and the novel, but it was not until the early 1800s that critics began to describe the short story as a specific art form with its own rules and structures. In Europe, Honore de Balzac and others were already writing and theorizing about the new form. An early American voice in the discussion was Poe's.

In 1842 he wrote a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842), a collection of thirty-nine brief stories and sketches, many dealing with the supernatural. In his influential review, Poe delineated the differences, as he saw them, between poetry, the novel and the ‘‘short prose narrative.’’

Rhymed poetry, according to Poe, was the highest of the genres. But the ‘‘tale proper,’’ he claimed, ‘affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the wide domains of mere prose.'' The novel was inferior because it could not be read in one sitting, therefore making it impossible to preserve a ‘‘unity of effect or impression.’’

The ideal short story, one that could be read in thirty minutes to two hours, was created to produce one single effect. If a writer's "very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.’’ Poe praised Hawthorne and Washington Irving for their skill with the new form, and kept firmly to the goal of the ‘‘single effect’’ in his own fiction. For this reason, his prose is almost exclusively in the short story form, and he limited each story to a small number of characters, simple plots, small geographical

Join now!

The Cask of Amontillado: Style

Setting

The setting of ‘‘The Cask of Amontillado’’ has attracted a great deal of critical attention, because both the location and the time of the story are only vaguely hinted at. To bring touches of the exotic to his murky atmosphere, Poe freely combines elements of different nations and cultures. Fortunato and Luchesi are Italians, knowledgeable about Italian wines. Montresor, as argued convincingly by Richard Benton and others, is a Frenchman. Amontillado is a Spanish wine. Montresor's family motto, Nemo me impune lacessit, is the motto of the royal arms of Scotland. Sprinkled among ...

This is a preview of the whole essay