Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

of present ideas, there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man”
(Visions of Excess 116).
The case of Edgar Allan Poe provides an apt illustration of the way in which the
moral and aesthetic concerns that characterized nineteenth-century cultural discourses
could conflict with and in turn affect the appraisal and status of an author’s work. Poe,
whose fame situates him as one of America’s most celebrated writers, seems to align
himself with the aesthetical principles of Baudelaire, Gautier, and Wilde. He believed
that although such elements as truth and passion could be integrated within literary texts,
Beauty should be privileged as a universal guiding criteria which would provide a
specific poetic “effect”: “[t]hat pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most
elevating,, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful”
(744). Poe’s form is one of precise exactitude whose meticulous attention to detail
reflects the ideal of “le mot juste” as advanced by Gustave Flaubert, while the content of
his texts frequently displays characters in a disturbing state of psychosis with a total
disregard for righteousness, respectability, and moral values. Often characterized by
gruesome tales of crime and murder, Poe’s fiction is filled with elements of dread and
terror, which, interestingly enough contributed greatly to the author’s notoriety.
Unfortunately for Poe, he was unable to breach into the contemporary literary scene for
the value of his texts was only recognized posthumously through an elongated series of
cross-cultural critical negotiations. Within the perspective of Johnson and Arnold, who
believed that literary greatness situated itself in its concern for moral instruction and the
“unity and profoundness of moral impression,” Poe’s most popular texts are readily
excluded for transgressing these conventions and for representing lives that would be,
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