Edgar Allan Poe

A cura di P. Gorgerino e L. Palmer 
 Five famous and gripping tales by E. A. Poe - MS Found in a Bottle, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat - are contained in this reader.
 The book also includes in-depth inserts on Poe's biography, the origin and structure of the short story and its evolution and division into literary subgenres, in addition to themes related to the tales themselves. 
 
 Teacher's Resources available online: Answer Key - Audioscripts - Summing-up Activities
 
 Cinque celebri e avvincenti racconti di E. A. Poe – MS Found in a Bottle, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat – sono contenuti in questo reader.
 Accompagnano il libro letture di approfondimento sui luoghi in cui Poe visse, sull’origine e la struttura del racconto, sulla sua evoluzione e divisione in sottogeneri letterari, oltre che su tematiche inerenti ai racconti stessi.

MS Found in a Bottle

Extension: The Baltimore Poe House and Museum

The Pit and the Pendulum

Extension: Short Stories

The Masque of the Red Death

Extension: Detective Stories and Horror Stories

The Tell-Tale Heart

Extension: The Beliefs in the Evil Eye

The Black Cat

Extension: Cats and Beliefs

Summing-up activities

Glossary

AFTER READING   The Pit and the Pendulum WORKING ON SKILLS: Listening mListen to the following extracts from the text and fill in the blanks. 7 1. Finally, my hand ...................................................... with a hard obstacle. It was a smooth cold ..................................................... . I followed it up but that did not help me understand how big my ...................................................... was. 2. I had no ..................................................., but curiosity made me continue my investigation. I decided to ....................................................... the dungeon in a direct line. The ground seemed solid but very ............................................. . I stepped on my own clothes and fell violently on my ......................... . Something attracted my attention: my chin was touching the ground but my lips and the upper part of my face .................................. . 3. I couldn t sleep for hours, but then I fell ................................................ . When I woke up, I found a ........................................................ of bread and a jug of ......................................... near me again. I think there was a ............................................ in the water, as I felt drowsy after ................................................................ it and I fell into a deep sleep. When I opened my ............................................................., I could also see the size and the shape of the prison. I had made a ..................................................... in calculating the size: the whole circuit of the ........................................................ was about twenty-five yards. 4. I saw that the ....................................................... of water was no longer there. The ............................................................. in the dish was spicy and I was horribly ............................................................ . That seemed to be the torture they had ........................................................... for me. The ..................................................................... was about thirty to ......................................................... feet overhead and similar to the walls. One of the ...................................................... plates attracted my attention in particular. WORKING ON SKILLS: Speaking 8 Think of the main character and of his behaviour in the dungeon. Say how he reacts to the following situations and describe his survival strategies.   He cannot see anything in the dungeon and he doesn t know what it is like.   He sees the pendulum and realizes that it is descending and will kill him. 40 

E X T E N S I O N SHORT STORIES The origin of short stories dates back to1 the oral traditions that produced tales such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Through the ages, stories were told in the form of fables, folk tales, parables2. Giovanni Boccaccio s Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer s Canterbury Tales were collections of short stories and marked the passage from the oral to the written tradition. As an independent literary genre3, the short story appeared in the USA at the beginning of the 19th century, G. Chaucer whereas in Great Britain it developed much later. In the second half of the th 19 century there was a great demand4 for short stories to be published in magazines and journals. This demand increased5 until the middle of the 20th century but from that moment on it declined6. Nowadays there is very little demand for them, even though literary magazines, online magazines and The New Yorker Magazine still publish them. The form and the characteristics of short stories, of course, depend on their author and on the period in which they were written. Besides, they may belong to different genres, such as classical, psychological, symbolic, detective, horror, and so on. In addition, those published in magazines may be different from those published in collections. Magazine short stories, for example, usually have a well-planned plot7, carefully described characters and a surprise ending, characteristics that may not be present in other types of short stories. Both short stories and novels are fictional8 prose. What distinguishes one from the other, then? First of all, their length. As Edgar Allan Poe maintained9 in his essay10 The Philosophy of Composition (1846), a short story should be read in one sitting. Nowadays, prose writing is considered a short story when it contains between 1,000 and 20,000 words. G. Boccaccio 1. dates back to: starts with. 2. parable: simple story with a moral purpose. 3. genre: form, style in art or literature. 4. demand: need, as people want them. 5. increased: rose. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 41 declined: diminished. plot: story, how the story is told. fictional: not real, invented. maintained: said, affirmed. essay: short piece of writing on a particular subject. 

Scopri cinque racconti di E.A. Poe: MS Found in a Bottle, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat.

The Black Cat Collana RAINBOWS

Level B1 • Pre-Intermediate - Collana RAINBOWS

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