The unconventional pleasure of the fantastic: the metalinguistic discourse in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, by Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

This article aims to show how the short story “The fall of the House of Usher”, by North American writer Edgar Allan Poe, may be considered a metafiction and to contain, from the metalinguistic elements identified in this narrative, a theory of literature conceived as of the author’s ideas advocated in critical and essayistic texts, just as one can infer, of the same story, a theory of the Fantastic genre in the literature. To undertake research, I sought support at the criticism of Poe’s works, particularly that of Julio Cortázar (1993) and Lúcia Santaella (1987), the Poe’s essays about aesthetics and modern theoreticians of fantastic narrative, as Irène Bessière (1974), Louis Vax (1965; 1972) and Jacques Finné (1980).