Edgar Allan Poe's background: The life of Edgar Allan Poe / Eric W. Carlson ; The sources of Poe's youthful despair / Jeffrey Meyers ; Poe's derangement in the late 1840s / Scott Peeples --
Social and psychological disorder in Poe's works: Poe's characters as self-portraits / Claudia C. Morrison ; Edgar Allan Poe and the insanity plea / John Cleman ; Abnormality and the confusion of life and death / Charles E. May ; Madness in Poe's tales as a means of escape / Daniel Hoffman ; Confessing shrewdness to deny madness in Poe's stories / Christopher Benfey ; The mad chamber of the mind in Poe's poetry / Benjamin F. Fisher ; Death, sex, and horror in Poe's poetry / Edward H. Davidson ; Insanity as the way to salvation in "The pit and the pendulum" / James Lundquist ; Poe's fixation on the death of beautiful women / Karen Weekes ; "Ligeia" as a tale of obsession and hallucination / Roy P. Basler --
Contemporary instances of death and abnormal psychology: The obsession of the stalker / Kathleen Megan ; Patricide without remorse / Manuel Roig-Franzia ; Journey of a schizophrenic / Elyn R. Saks ; The insanity defense / Lara Bricker.