Teaching Poe's Humor - ALA 2025 Poe Studies Association Teaching Panel
Edgar Allan Poe worked for a double audience (the popular and the critical), in double tones and manners (grim and mocking, metaphysical and pseudo-scientific). Whether he strove for alternance or interdependence between the terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” which he used to categorize his own narratives, critics such as G. R. Thompson and Dennis Eddings have argued that the former – more visible in tales such as “King Pest,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “Lionizing,” and “Loss of Breath” - underscored the carnivalesque, the satirical, and the hoaxical.