A Todorovan Study Of Edgar Allan Poe's Detective Tales

Edgar Allan Poe,mastering in the tales of the gothic and the mystic,is praised as the godfather of and renowned in the detective tales.The writing style of Poe is greatly influenced by the life experience he suffered through all his life.Therefore,when creating his detective tales,Poe,based on the gothic features in his mystic and horror novels,laid a scientific and rational foundation for his works,thus constructed unique deductive system,which is beneficial to other writers of the same genre.With the application of Todorovan structuralist theory of syntactical narratology,the present thesis purports to make a tentative study of binary modes of"writer-and-reader" outside the text and "detective-and-culprit" within the text by focusing upon Poe's five,detective tales.In so doing,the thesis intends to argue that by writing detective tales,Poe intends to treat his own schizophrenia by letting the rationality of the detective self rival against the irrationality of the culprit self.In addition to the in the Introduction and Conclusion,the main body is divided into five chapters,each of them focuses on one tale of detection which is created during the specified period of Poe,and is analyzed on the basis of the views from"The Typology of Detection Fiction".The first chapter discusses the issue on "two murders" and "two murderers" in "The Murder in the Rue Morgue";the second chapter is oriented on the two genres of one tale in "The Murder of Marie Roget";the third chapter focuses on the vitalized second story of "The Gold-Bug";the forth chapter rests on the detective mode of "the suspect-as-detective" in "Thou Art The Man";the fifth chapter discusses the narrative mode about the "story" and the "plot"in "The Purloined Letter".