"The Tell-Tale Texts"

Edgar Allan Poe, as one of the most controversial and misunderstood genius, hasa special position in the American literature history。His novels，especially gothicnovels，were hit out for full of vivid depiction about perverse criminals and violence.Poe comes under fire for his moral idea in200years. Although nowadays critics agreethat Poe expressed his moral stance in the works, there is still a lack of attention onthe moral factors of his works. Under the influence of Chinese and western NarrativeEthic Theory, this paper analyses some shot novels of Poe, hoping to find how andwhy he hid his moral outlook in the novels.This paper includes three parts: introduction, body and conclusions. TheIntroduction analyses the status quo of Poe’s study, pointing out the study is far fromenough and introduce the innovations of this paper，then introduces theoretical basisof this study: narrative ethics. The body is divided into three chapters: Chapter1analyses Poe’s three short novels, finding out he set up different hidden writers indifferent texts. Chapter2concentrates on Chinese narrative ethics, and finds specificsocial contexts cause the writer to hold different moral stances. Chapter3is based onthe conclusion of the previous chapters, which carries on discussing the narrativesafety, and proposes a new criterion——the basic value of society. Last is theconclusion part.By analyzing the ethic relations of different novels, the author finds that Poe isnot without moral sense. He expresses different aspects of himself in his novels. Thecritics should combine careful textual analysis with extratextual and intertextualconsiderations, which will help to better interpret the moral stance of a text.