This 50th anniversary reissue of G.R. Thompson's Poe's Fiction makes available for Poe scholars, students, and aficionados the groundbreaking work that changed the course of Poe studies. Written in highly accessible prose, the book reads as fresh today as when it first appeared. Poe's Fiction , which established that Poe was neither a hack nor a madman, neither a writer purely devoted to ideality nor solely a morbid Gothicist-but rather consistently a romantic ironist-was not only the first book to make full sense of Poe, it also helped to explain Poe's enormous influence on twentieth-century literature. "G. R. Thompson's Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales shook up academic scholarship by revealing the profound impact on Poe of the German Romantics and their mockery of conventional beliefs. From them, Poe acquired not just a literary fondness for parody and hoaxing but also a deeply skeptical view of the universe as deceptive, perverse, and chaotic. Such writers as Schlegel, Tieck, and Hoffmann helped Poe devise a playful way to confront the abyss of unbelief-by composing dark, defiantly ironic narratives. That perspective now forms an axiom of Poe criticism." -J. Gerald Kennedy, Boyd Professor of English, Louisiana State University, and author of Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe. "If Richard Wilbur's revolutionary 'Introduction' (1962) taught us to read Poe's poetry, early and late, as 'Cosmic in extent' . . . then surely G.R. Thompson's penetrating analysis of Poe's 'Romantic Irony' tells us exactly how to read the troublesome 'gothic' tales that come between." -Michael J. Colacurcio, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA, and author of The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales . G. R. Thompson (1937 - 2019), former Professor of English, Purdue University at West Lafayette, was the author of numerous books, including The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales; Reading the American Novel, 1865-1914; editor of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Norton Critical Edition); and founder of the journal Poe Studies. Robert Paul Lamb, Professor of English, Purdue University at West Lafayette, is the author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Philip Haldeman, owner and publisher, English Hill Press, is the author of numerous articles, short stories, reviews, and a novel, Shadow Coast.