A new literary genre, the Gothic story, arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the United States, the most important exponent of Gothic fiction was Edgar Allen Poe, whose “horror” stories evoke the dark side that many of us half-believe lies just beneath the surface of more conventional lives. In this article we will discuss the Gothic in light of two of Poe's stories, "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher", and we will compare Poe's story with a somewhat dark story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Minister's Black Veil ". " We will also analyze why Poe's stories are Gothic and Hawthorne's are not. Critic Mark Edmunson defines Gothic literature as “the art of the uncanny,” adding that “Gothic shows that life, even at its most apparently innocent, it is possessed, that the present is in slaves of the past. Everyone is guilty; everyone, in time, will pay the price. And the gothic should possess the reader too; so he will not be able to think of anything else. or see it – again and again to achieve some peace.” Edmunson quotes Chris Baldick, author of a book on the Frankenstein myth, that Gothic literature “should combine a fearful sense of legacy in time with a claustrophobic sense of closure.” into space, with these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into the universe. American. A nation of ideals, America has also been, not surprisingly, a nation of disillusionment, and we often find a kind of sympathy. resonance in dark and wicked tales. And the first prominent American exponent of the Gothic was Edgar Allen Poe. So, what characterizes a Gothic... medium of paper... debts to the classical Gothic tradition. According to Edmunson, this is largely due to the fact that, at the end of this century, we are once again both cynical and insecure: “Because now we find ourselves in a culture in which the Gothic idiom has slipped from fiction and begun to shape and regulate our perception of reality. , catapulting us into a world where serial killers, bizarre molesters and the like are reality. They are – for more and more of us – what is out there” (Edmunson, p. 48). In its strange language of archetype and symbol, the Gothic horror tale can represent today's reality. Works Cited Edmunson, Mark. “American Gothic”, vol. 3, Civilization, 01-05-1996, pp 48. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne: Stories and Sketches. Library of America edition, New York, 1982. Poe, Edgar Allen. Selected Writings of Edgar Allen Poe. Riverside Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1956.