https://doi.org/10.31648/pl.7861
The aim of the article is to re-examine the literary legacy of Edgar Allan Poe from the perspective of the third decade of the 21st century. The starting point is a brief discussion of its complicated reception in the USA and Great Britain as well as its strikingly vivid presence in the contemporary culture. However, the main argument centres on how some of the fiction written by Poe reveals a striking convergence with the present-day environmental concerns engendered by an imminent man-wrought ecological catastrophe, and with the insights offered by zoocriticism. First, I analyse the selected stories by Poe from the perspective of ecocriticism. I wish to argue that at least some portion of his fiction could be included in “American environmentalist discourse”. I undertake to demonstrate that The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion and The Colloquy of Monos and Una carry a clear ecological message, The Domain of Arnheim features the artistic elevation of the natural world, while The Island of the Fay reveals the prefigurings of the modern Gaia Hypothesis. I also take a look at the stories Metzengerstein, The Black Cat, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue within the framework offered by zoocriticism, which studies the dynamics of the relation between Homo sapiens and other species. In this context I briefly refer to The Raven as well. The presented considerations may help understand why Poe’s fiction appeals to us so much now, in the age of Anthropocene, and at the same time try to counterbalance the image of Poe enshrined in the popular imagination – as the author of dark, terrifying, escapist stories, who has little to say about the world we live in.
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