SOURCE: Pike, Judith E. “Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse.” Studies in American Fiction 26, no. 2 (autumn 1998): 171-92.

In the following essay, Pike analyzes Poe's preoccupation with death and the “fetishism of the exquisite corpse” during the nineteenth century.

Although Poe's debt to the Gothic genre is documented in his tales with numerous references to Gothic texts and occult literature, Poe's “architecture of death”¹ is not merely a case of belated romanticism.² The resurgence of the Gothic architectures of death in Poe should instead be read as a literary response to cultural attempts to raze those very structures and replace them with a new ideology of death. By Poe's time, death was being sublimated by a whole new industry and aesthetic of mourning, which in effect commercialized and domesticated death. Although numerous cultural historians have surveyed the shift in the iconography of death from the eighteenth century...