The cask of Amontillado





THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO



                      (Edgar Allan Poe)













AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Born in Boston, January 19, 1809. American writer, poet, critic, and editor, best known for evocative short stories and poems.  Is famous for his tales and poems of horror and mystery.

 He never really knows his parents, his father left the family and the mother died when he was young. He was separated from his brother and sister.

 He went to live with John and Frances Valentine Allan, a tobacco merchandiser in Richmond, Virginia. His relationship with John was bad, he didn't want him to write, he preferred that Poe follow him in the family business.

 In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will. Poe struggled to live in poverty.

 In 1835 he began to publish more stories and developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of contemporaries. He received the nickname of "Tomahawk man". His strong and combative critics strained his relationships with the magazine and he left it in 1937.

 He continued with brief stints in other journals. In 1844 he moved to New York City. He published "The New York Sun" a story that later he revealed to be a hoax.   The publication "The Raven" make him a literary sensation.

 This year he found himself under attack of criticism of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he said that Longfellow was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against himself.

 He died on October 7, 1849. His final days were a mystery. He was on his way to Philadelphia and he was found in Baltimore in great disease. 

 It was said that he died of "congestion of the brain" but his death has been the subject of endless speculation.

 After his passing, his reputation was badly damaged by Rufus Griswold, who has been hardly criticized by Poe and took revenge in his obituary to Poe.  He said that Poe was a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer. 

 His works are as compelling today as they were more than a century ago. Poe crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise and move modern readers. His dark works influenced other writers like Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, etc.,

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer. He chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He tried to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law.

 Publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans.  There was a booming growth in American periodicals around this time period, fueled in part by new technology, but many did not last beyond a few issues and publishers often refused to pay their writers, or paid them much later than they promised.Throughout his attempts to live as a writer, Poe repeatedly had to resort to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

Expectations / Predictions about the text

I haven't read it yet. I do not like horror stories, where people suffer. I think this will be like them. With a lot of suffering, but with mystery and painful.

Analysis or Connection between literary work and historical background.

There are few things that happened in the US of 1846 and The Cask of Amontillado, however, there are several possible influences.  But it is known he had a rivalry with Thomas English Dunn, a politician, and author from New Jersey. 

Before The Cask of Amontillado was created Dunn published a book titled 1844, or, The Power of S.F. which contained the main character that seemed to be an insulting parody of Poe. This character, Marmaduke Hammerhead, authored “The Black Crow”, is depicted as a drunkard, a liar, and an abusive lover. The Power of the S.F. makes references to secret society and has an overall main theme of revenge. 

This parallels The Cask of Amontillado in that Fortunato at one point reveals he is a Freemason, one of the dominant secret societies of America, and similarly the main theme is also revenge.

Another possible inspiration for Poe´s story was the Washington movement, which was a fellowship that promoted temperance. This group attempted to scare people out of drinking alcohol, and Poe makes a promise to them.

Thus, this story becomes a tale meant to shock people out of drinking considering Fortunato is convinced of his own demise while heavily intoxicated.

During this time, there was a cultural fear of live burial so steps were taken during the time period to prevent this.  There were given methods of alerting if someone was in fact buried alive. This inspiration is in the way Poe utilizes Fortunato's jester costume. 

Literary movement

He was a product of his time, the Romantic era.  Poe's brand of Romanticism was akin to his contemporaries but most of his works often bordered on what was later called the Gothic genre. 


Country

An underground catacomb, somewhere in Italy, during the Carnival season. 

Genre

Gothik, a genre that Poe followed to appease the public taste. His themes with questions of death including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation or dead direct his works to be considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism, which Poe disliked.


Did you confirm your predictions? 

No, there is no mistery in it. It is just a description of a revenge. How could he called Fortunato his friend if he feels bad against him? And the revenge was perfectly planned. It was planned so he suffered a lot before he died.

 References

 CliffsNotes
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/poes-short-stories/summary-and-analysis/the-cask-of-amontillado

The literature network
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/25/
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe





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