ABSTRACT: Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) reimagines the women of Edgar Allan Poe's canon. Through intertextual and adaptation analysis focusing on the characters of Madeline, Verna, Camille, Tamerlane, and Morelle, this article explores how the series reconstructs Poe's Gothic archetypes across a spectrum of authority and morality, revealing both the possibilities and perils of female autonomy. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon's theory of adaptation, the study situates these portrayals within contemporary cultural discourses that interrogate gender, agency, and the politics of canon formation. Mike Flanagan's Usher does not simply modernize Poe's stories but confronts the ideological anxieties underpinning them, recasting the Gothic as a space where women no longer passively haunt but act. Usher transforms Poe's haunted femininity into a twenty-first-century Gothic of volition and consequence. "Gothic" here refers not merely to a repertoire of familiar motifs—decay, haunting, and psychological excess—but to a cultural mode preoccupied with repression, moral transgression, and the return of what has been buried. Flanagan's series retains this structure of return while redistributing agency within it, recasting the Gothic as a space in which women no longer function as aestheticized victims of male obsession but as subjects who enact judgment, resistance, and ethical reckoning.
ABSTRACT: Since 1905, when "The Gold-Bug" was first introduced to Chinese readers through translation, various labels have been applied to Poe by Chinese translators, editors, and critics of different generations. Their descriptions of such labels, or translators' discourses, which can be found in the paratexts of Chinese translations of Poe's works, have shaped Poe's image in China. As a linear narrative can hardly clarify the intricate interplay among the discourses, this essay offers a dynamic account of it by analyzing how and why some typical labels are attributed to Poe. We have found that the representation of Poe's image in China is fluid in three ways. First, some of the labels applied to Poe early on were rarely mentioned by later translators' discourses while others were inherited by them. Second, labels indicating Poe's expertise in a particular genre were more common at the end of the twentieth century. Third, different descriptions were attached to the same labels as time passed. It is notable that Chinese translators, editors, and critics have given unique connotations to the labels, influenced by their knowledge, historical context, imagination, and personal preference.
ABSTRACT: Approaching Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher through the lens of studying and teaching Poe, this essay argues that the miniseries (un)makes conventional knowledge about Poe. It does so by intensifying and pastiching Poe's media image as a Gothic writer of horror and crime while simultaneously invoking forms of scholarly or pedagogical knowledge typically confined to Poe studies. The Fall of the House of Usher functions as a conceptual adaptation insofar as it mobilizes critical concepts, such as Romantic irony, as well as established readings of Poe's work across race, gender, and sexuality within a platform-tailored visual narrative. Addressing both general audiences and Poe-savvy, "knowing" viewers, the miniseries constructs a coherent fictional world in which Poe's plots, characters, and motifs are enmeshed with contemporary realities and technologies, from medicalized Gothic to generative AI. Alongside its critical analysis, the essay also discusses how the series can be used in the classroom to explore Poe's reception history, major interpretive debates, and the circulation of scholarly knowledge through popular serial television.
ABSTRACT: Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher , a miniseries loosely "based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe," premiered on Netflix in 2023. In this article, I argue that Flanagan uses Poe's one finished novel and his tales, poems, and essays to construct an ecogothic parable about financially driven ecocide. At the same time, Flanagan's show also provides a utopian reflection on adaptation's ability to project a future in which stories are continually recombined and reimagined. Weaving together the ecogothic and adaptation, Flanagan fashions a contrapuntal design shot through with terror and utopian dreams of what future, if any, exists for multispecies life in the Anthropocene. The Fall of the House of Usher , in its reimagining of Poe, counterpoints the ecogothic's anxieties about planetary failure and the end of human and nonhuman life with the utopian possibilities essential to the theory and practice of adaptation. Ultimately, Flanagan poses the question of human and nonhuman futurity through the show's engagement with the ecogothic and adaptation. If the former captures the growing fear of an absolute environmental end toward which the planet is racing, the latter promises an intertextual tomorrow in which stories, such as Poe's, will continually be retold.
