The Horrible World In The Enclosed Circles

With a relatively small volume of works, about seventy short stories, a short novel, some fifty poems, and a roughly equivalent volume of essays, Edgar Allan Poe has exerted a substantial influence on American and world literature. The influence of his tales of terror on the subsequent novels or short stories is especially enormous. With respect to the criticisms on Poe and his works, most are concerned with some individual tale, and much research work has been devoted to Poe's biographical details. In the thesis, we are going to examine of his tales of terror as a whole, putting the stress of the inquiry on his texts, his theories of composition and his philosophy.The thesis endeavors to unearth the common structure of the whole, and meanwhile dig out the meaning of that structure. By comparisons and generalization, we find that the enclosed circular structure is the basic plane figure shared by most of Poe's tales of terror. The locale is mostly confined in an enclosed circle; the time goes in a closed circle, not in a linear continuum; the personality of the characters develops in the circular orbit.The Introduction traces the history of Poe's literary position inthe critic circles in the hope that it can provide our reading of Poe's tales with a broad critical background.Chapter One is devoted to a detailed discussion of the locales in Poe's tales of terror. It points out that Poe's locales are mainly constituted by swirling circles, typically the whirlpools. These enclosed spatial circles have two connotations. Descending into the circles implies the fear, suffocation, anxiety and vertigo in the deep psychology of the heroes and the author. Furthermore, the descending circles of the whirlpools symbolize the "degenerated" society in the nineteenth century, in which people had been corrupted by materialism and industrialization.Chapter Two concentrates on the analysis of the circular time in Poe's tales of terror. Poe's time goes not in a linear continuum but in circles. The temporal circles surround Poe's characters. Midnight, the ending as well as the beginning point of a temporal circle, is the time of death.Chapter Three sets out to trace out the developmental orbit of the characters in Poe's tales of terror. The disintegration of the united personality under the pressure of the society and the integration of the divided selves through death constitute a circle. There is a close affinity between the circular developmental orbit of the characters and Poe's philosophy that all the matter in theuniverse moves in a circular route. This is the philosophical implication of Eureka.The Conclusion summarizes the psychological, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of the enclosed circles in Poe's tales of terror.