Romanticism and Poe

• Usually in a Romantic story, the setting is in some obscure or unknown place, or else it is set at some distant time in the past. 
• Poe's detective fiction is set in France rather than in America, thus giving it a Romantic distance from the reader.
• The Romantic writer is often both praised and condemned for emphasizing the strange, the bizarre, the unusual, and the unexpected in his or her writing, and it is out of the Romantic tradition.
• The purpose of art, for Poe, was to choose subjects which could affect the reader in a manner which he would not encounter in everyday life. 
• Poe hated the idea of stories that could be related to or brought into an everyday life situation; he looked at them as mundane.
• The subject of many of his tales dealt with living corpses, with frightening experiences, with horrors which startled the reader, and with situations which even we have never imagined before.