Mapping Edgar Allan Poe’s Terror

The main purpose of this thesis is to provide a complete study of the effect of terror in Edgar Allan Poe’s works through the development of a detailed digital cartography of the author’s terror fiction.

To achieve this goal, five maps will be created and divided into at least three main interrelated categories: spaces, themes, and characters. The main goal is to discern patterns that link spaces, themes, and characters, effectively achieving the effect of terror. In order to provide a complete study of the effect of terror, the corpus will englobe the totality of the Poesque oeuvre.

This thesis aims to offer a new way of approaching Edgar Allan Poe’s terror and will have as its main research outputs an open source website to share the maps created throughout my research, as well as an annotated digital anthology of Poe’s terror stories, comparing their first and last editions side by side with annotations regarding the changes made my Poe as well as regarding the evolution of the effect of terror throughout the years that separate those editions.

Both website and anthology will be made available in an open source format and will be published, at least in a first moment, in English in order to achieve the largest number of people as possible. Furthermore, it aims to transcend the academic world and to start being used as a powerful tool in schools.