Patricia C. Smith
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Grotesque" and "Arabesque" in Poe's tales
There has been some debate over the meaning of Poe's terms "Grotesque" and "Arabesque" in his collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
Patricia C. Smith argues that "in 1840 the terms grotesque and arabesque really were not as slippery as they seem in 1974. We have long been aware of Sir Walter Scott's coupling of the terms in his suggestive 1827 essay on Hoffmann, but Poe need not have used Scott or any other single source for the terms ... Arabesque and grotesque both refer to a style (or styles) of decoration which greatly interested people in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in magazines, encyclopedias, and other publications, one finds lively discussions about the difference between the two terms, the uses to which the style might be put by modern decorators, and controversy about its aesthetic and moral values. These discussions in the popular literature of Poe's day suggest a number of reasons for Poe's private affinity for the terms. I think it worthwhile here to give a short history of the style and its critics prior to the nineteenth century, and it is probably most useful to begin with the sort of historical account that Poe was probably familiar with. The Encyclopaedia Americana, for example (Philadelphia, 1831), gives a succinct and correct definition of both arabesque and grotesque in its "Grotesque" article, and it begins by acknowledging the contemporary confusion between the terms."
See Patricia C. Smith in " Poe's Arabesque," from Poe Studies, vol. VII, no. 2, December 1974, pp. 42-45
