James E McDermott

Fear of Nothingness James E McDermott

Not only is Nothingness a major theme of Poe, it is precisely what makes Poe's works so terrifying and frightening because whereas Poe might have been able to make a romantic leap in the belief of the divinity of the individual, his protagonists are not. Their terror of the Void overwhelms them because they have no hope, no belief, and no way to give meaning to their lives or to their deaths. As gothic novel expert, Devendra P. Varma explains, "Poe raised terror to tragic heights" by "adding psychology to the old gothic raw material and capturing the airy, gossamer filaments of sensation by touching upon obscure feelings of psychic dread". To investigate those "obscure feelings of psychic dread" in the light of existential thinking through an interpretation of fourteen of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of horror and terror arranged in a thematic order is the design of this book.