Autore: Edgar Allan Poe

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether is a dark short story centred on a naïve and unnamed narrator’s visit to a mental asylum in the southern provinces of France.

This “Maison de Santé” is led by Doctor Maillard, known for a revolutionary new method of treating mental illness, called the “system of soothing”. The narrator is invited to dinner, and at the table strange things happen, shocking terribly the narrator. What kind of treatment is going on in this mental asylum? How will the story end?

The text includes four skills activities and dossiers to expand the cultural aspects associated with the story and connected to the setting.

Aged by his obsessive fears, Roderick Usher confines himself inside his inhospitable mansion with his cataleptic sister. Lost in his blossoming work of art, a painter becomes blind to the vanishing life of his loving wife. Fallen into the depths of madness and murder, a man lucidly recalls the stages of his own personal descent into hell, watched by the sagacity of a strangely faithful cat.

With The Fall of the House of Usher, The Oval Portrait and The Black Cat, Edgar Allan Poe’s mastery of prose records the intricacies and mysteries of the human psyche, transforming the Gothic story into the chronicle of a ghostly crime.

This volume offers the opportunity to enjoy an original text while learning at the same time: notes and language activities help the reader to follow the stories, appreciate aspects of the writing, memorize vocabulary, focus on and practice language structures. A final section contains further stimuli, contextualizing notes and images.