A Comparative Study Of Poe's Gothic Fiction And Pu Songling's Strange Tales From Make-do Studio From Cultural Perspective

Edgar Allan Poe and Pu Songling came from different nations and lived in different times, and they both achieved notable success in horrible fiction. This thesis is to analyze the main factors to their predilection for terror stories from the cultural perspective.The first chapter introduces the reason for selecting this topic. The Gothic novels and the tales of ghosts and monsters, as horrible novels, have always been subjected to discrimination both in the East, especially in China and the West. In recent years, with the development of literary research, more and more scholars and experts pay attention to the horrible fiction. As Gothic novelists, both Edgar Allan Poe and Pu Songling lived in poverty, but their life experiences had given them inspiration to create horrible novels. Recent research on Poe and Pu has produced some similarities and differences findings about their horrible fiction. These similarities and differences in Poe's and Pu's works are explored by scholars and experts of comparative studies.The second chapter is comparing similarities and differences between Poe's and Pu's works. In their works, beauty and death are two representative themes. Many of Poe's and Pu's short stories show an unfailing interest in love and beauty. However, Poe's conception of beauty is more Gothic than that of classism; while Pu's view on beauty is more tender than that of Gothic novels. Besides love, the theme of stories of the two writers is related to death. But they have different perception of death: Poe pays attention to the intrinsic horror of death while Pu attaches importance to the meaning of death.The third chapter focuses on approaching the cause of similarities and differences in Poe's and Pu's short stories from the literary perspective. Both Poe and Pu are influenced by their literary predecessors' works. Poe carries forward the Euramerican Gothic literature that gives importance to the intrinsic horror of death. Thus, in Poe's works, horror appears from the beginning to the end. Pu read many Chinese classics that adopt the Golden Mean, which makes Pu's works less horrible than Poe's.The forth chapter makes a detailed analysis of Poe's and Pu's works from the religious perspective. Poe has a complex relationship with religion. In Poe's works there are some stories about retributive justice and resurrecting from death. Pu's religious ideology blends the features of Buddhism and Taoism and he is also influenced by Confucianism. The retributive justice and transmigration of Buddhism, exorcizing ghosts of Taoism and benevolent government of Confucianism, which are reflected in Strange Tales from Make-do Studio.In conclusion, the author summarizes the significance of Poe's and Pu's horrible works and their influence and contributions to the later literature.