The Dreadful Beauty Of Horror In Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Fiction

Gothic fiction, one of the most influential fiction genres in European literature,originated in Britain in the late18thcentury. They are absurd and odd stories themedon violence, murder and death, and most of them take place in the medieval gothicarchitecture or the remains. Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet, short story writerand literature critic of the19thcentury, enriches the range and enhances the content ofgothic fiction by establishing the literary technique of evoking psycho-horror, whichis realized by his sole pursuit for the construction of the “horror” effect with referenceto the theory of “unity of effect”, and contributes significantly to the burgeoning anddeveloping of the American gothic stories. However, these works, which expose theruthlessness and outrage of the reality through the description of gothic absurdity, rancounter to the literary mainstream of Romanticism at that time, and thus wereincompatible with the literary need of the American society.Not until the20thcentury did men of letters pay close attention to the value ofPoe’s works, and subsequently, an upsurge of discussion and study on his poems andfiction sprang up in the literary world. Various literary theories are employed in themultilevel researches into his works, however, among them, searching for beautyfrom the gothic elements in his fiction from the perspective of aesthetics occupies arelatively small proportion. This thesis endeavors to search for the dreadful beauty ofhorror in Poe’s gothic fiction, based on a combination of Kantian Aesthetics and Poe’sown aesthetic views.To explore and uncover the dreadful beauty hidden in the description of themysterious and strained atmosphere, the images of inhumane and indifferentcharacters, as well as the set of eerie and gripping plots, from the three aspectsextracted from the abstruse Kantian Aesthetics, i.e., the relations between beauty andinterest, between beauty and form, and between beauty and imagination, incombination with Poe’s own literary views such as “art for art’s sake” and “unity ofeffect”, is the core of this thesis. It finally comes to the conclusion that through the depiction of horror and absurdity, Poe’s gothic fiction brings readers the enjoyment ofbeauty, and in this sense, his literary views are to a large extent in accordance withpart of Kantian Aesthetics.