Passion Spent: Love, Identity, and Reason in the Tales of E.A. Poe

This book is a reading of the arabesque tales of Edgar Allan Poe, focusing on the main themes of love, identity, and reason as they are played out in a core set of four love stories bearing the names of beautiful undying ladies. Included are chapters on structural plot analysis, the doppelgänger motif and close readings of thematic features in the four Poe tales. The book also offers a categorization of Poe's entire fictional oeuvre using the terms arabesque and grotesque, as well as a discussion of love's psychology and tellability.