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This essay revisits two of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous tales, ??Ligeia?? and ??The Tell-Tale Heart??, and explores their experimenting with a rhetoric of fear (fear being both an effect potentially induced in the reader and the object of representation in the textual dynamics). It shows how these tales rely on repetition to create a complex sense of return and reduplication (in ??Ligeia??) and of preparation or rehearsal (in ??The Tell-Tale Heart??), resulting in an ambiguous game with substitution and displacement between the same and the other.