"A man must laugh, or die": Visual Interpretations of Poe's Comical and Parodical Tales

Abstract:A brief overview of Poe's most iconic illustrated editions shows that the humorous and satirical features of his texts have called the attention of fewer editors and artists than the aspects of the beautiful, the sublime, the arabesque, the grotesque, the macabre, and so forth. Here we review many of the freshest and liveliest interpretations in which parody is put forward, using as a reference some exceptional visual renderings that also display the likes of times and places. The early interpretations provided by artists such as Church (1884), Sterner (1894–95), or Coburn (1902); later on by Servolini (1929), Rackham (1935), Bofa (1941), Eichenberg (1944), or Dubout (1948); in the second part of the twentieth century by Calsina (1971); and very recently by Grimly (2004, 2009) prove that the parodical side of Poe's oeuvre mattered and still matters.