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This is the only series to provide in-depth critical introductions to major modern and contemporary short story writers worldwide.

Each volume offers:

-- A comprehensive overview of the artist's short fiction -- including detailed analyses of every significant story

-- Interviews, essays, memoirs and other biographical materials -- often previously unpublished

-- A representative selection of critical responses

-- A comprehensive primary bibliography, a selected bibliography of important criticism, a chronology of the artist's life and works and an index

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CHOICE Review

This study of Poe's short fiction makes a significant contribution to the field because of its effective employment of theoretical approaches and the clarity of its language and organization. May divides the volume into three parts: the short fiction, the writer, and the critics. The major section, on the short fiction, explores the artistic self-consciousness that at one time many critics had pointed out as a negative aspect and that now, in the light of post-structuralist critics, becomes a positive and productive approach. This concept complements Poe's own theoretical approaches to writing short fiction. Accordingly, May provides in the second section a selection of Poe's own thoughts on the genre. Excerpts from his essays and reviews move the reader from "his awareness of the importance of the unity of interest or effect. . .to his metaphysical ideas of unity in his prose poem Eureka." In the third section May includes three essays that represent important critical approaches over the last quarter century: Kermit Vanderbilt (formalism) on "The Masque of the Red Death," Michael Williams (structuralism) on "The Gold Bug," and Ronald Bieganowski (reader-response) on "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." May's book is helpful to all, especially to undergraduates.-T. Bonner, U S Air Force Academy