Which of Edgar Allan Poe tales are grotesques and which of them are arabesques?

Answer 1

It might not be possible to tell which tales are grotesque and which are arabesque, since it seems that even Poe himself did not see them that way, in other words as being one or the other. In his preface to the work he does not state which are which. The work is a two volume set and there were no distinctions that the grotesque tales were in one volume and the arabesque tales were in the other. Some critics have given an opinion that the grotesque tales are the gory ones while the arabesque tales are the non-gory ones even though both types may be tales of terror. The debate continues evermore.

Answer 2

Tales like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" are considered grotesques, characterized by dark and macabre themes, while tales like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Ligeia" are arabesques, known for their intricate and ornate descriptions and themes of the supernatural.

Answer 3

Poe had a collection of stories called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, but there is no clear-cut definition provided within his works. Outside of his writing, the term refers to a complex, non-repeating style of Islamic art. He uses it in "Ligeia," a story in Vol. I of the collection, to describe a tapestry: "It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black." In Poe's fiction, the arabesque is associated with ideas of exotic disorder and unpredictability, and it's always hard to tell whether Poe is making an ironic statement on excess and decadence or an enthralled portrayal of interesting imagery.

-mbastnagel