And the genius can do a lot from his armchair. In Poe, the narrator is unnamed, and we know little about him.Įnter the genius. Watson, an actual character with his own backstory, his own features, a name, his own capabilities. Doyle actually improved upon Poe’s narrator by making his narrator, Dr. This narrator is impressed, sometimes astounded by his friend’s almost superhuman abilities. Similarity number two: both stories are told by a narrator who is friends with the detective. ![]() He might have taken the idea from a series of magazine articles about a French policeman. ![]() The word detective did not actually exist when Poe was writing, which gives you a sense of how novel he was. One writer said that “The only difference between Dupin and Holmes is the English Channel.” Similarity number one: in both stories we have at the heart a highly intelligent but somewhat eccentric and enigmatic detective. These are the similarities between the Dupin stories and Sherlock Holmes, and there are many. Then Jacke reads “The Purloined Letter,” the third and final (and perhaps best) of the Dupin stories. Dupin, the structure of the Dupin stories, and considers the similarities between Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Poe’s detective M. “Poe…was the father of the detective tale,” he said, “and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own…Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” “Edgar Allan Poe,” he wrote, “invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad.” Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who knew a thing or two about detective stories, was quick to credit his boyhood hero with inspiring Sherlock Holmes and all the mysteries that came after. In 1965, the critic Joseph Wood Krutch studied the available evidence and came to a surprising conclusion. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. ![]() For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another.
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