![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving’s lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature. The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. (from Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927) ![]()
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