SOURCE: "Playful 'Germanism' in The Fall of the House of Usher': The Storyteller's Art" in Ruined Eden of the Present, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe: Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel, edited by G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke, Purdue University Press, 1981, pp. 355-74.

Fisher is an American educator and critic with a special interest in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In the following essay, he analyzes "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a parody of Gothic literature.

During the past thirty years, few approaches to Poe's great tale have failed to pay respects to Darrel Abel's "A Key to the House of Usher," first published in 1949 and several times reprinted, wherein he analyzes the centrality of symbolism embodying the conflict between life-reason and death-madness. In no way will I challenge this or other readings that argue for serious import inherent in "Usher," although...