An exploration of Poe’s appeal to American fear in “The Pit and the Pendulum” / by Lauryn E. Everly

While many literary criticisms analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s works through a psychoanalytic lens, “An Exploration of Poe’s Appeal to American Fear in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’” examines Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” through a New Historical literary lens. The short story is analyzed with a focus on the context of societal fears of revolution and religious persecution in early 1800s America, and with a notable examination of the instability in newly founded religious institutions within America that many literary critics have, in the past, overlooked. With a close examination of American views on the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, and the rumored rise of the European Illuminati, Edgar Allan Poe is examined as a political commentator who masked his critique of a culturally unstable America in a horrific tale of the Spanish Inquisition.