A Comparative Study On The Views Of Death In Edgar Allan Poe’s And Pu Songling’s Works

Pu Songling brought the ghost stories to a historical peak with his epic collection. His famous Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio has been recognized as a classical Chinese literary work for more than three hundred years. It consists of 488 short tales. This story uses specific methods to reflect the social customs at that time and presents the ancient ideology before readers’ eyes. Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet, editor and author and is considered as the important representative personage in American Romantic Movement. He is one of the greatest American writers of the short tales and makes a contribution to the development of science fiction. His short stories are full of mystery and horror.Many of Poe’s stories on the death theme have been the subject of study by the antecedent scholars, especially those stories containing horror and death. While only a few scholars want to study his works from the aspect of interpreting death. In a word, lots of scholars and critics prefer to have done innumerable researches on Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic stories or Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio separately, rather than make a comparison between the two authors’ views of death. Many scholars only gather a few portions of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, but they couldn’t devote themselves to studying Poe’s works in the aspect of interpreting death, because they think death can’t reflect the uniqueness. Poe and Pu Songling came from different countries and lived in a different time, but both of them made a great contribution to the horror fiction.A comparative study on Edgar Allen Poe’s and Pu Songling’s views of death is a challenging subject. This paper attempts to make research on their views of death with the comparative approach so as to understand their works deeply. This thesis adopts the comparative literary theories to analyze these similarities and differences in the views of death. Comparative literature is just an academic course dealing with the literature from two or more different cultural, linguistic or national groups. Parallel study is to compare the different literary authors and literary works in different countries, with similarities so as to study their differences and to grasp the artistic features. Parallel study demonstrates the importance of learning the authors’ works and experience and it is keen on studying their views of death. This thesis makes up of four chapters.Chapter One gives a brief background introduction to Pu Songling, Edgar Allan Poe and their works, and then gives a summary of the similar background, introduces the present study of Pu Songling and Edgar Allan Poe and proposes the main theme of this dissertation.Chapter Two is divided into three parts to analyze these similarities and differences in the views of death with some examples: A Predicament, Ligeia, Sharp Knife, Evil Dead and A Bao.Many of Poe’s and Pu Songling’s stories show their interest in death.Chapter Three focuses on analyzing the causes of similarities and differences in their short stories from the perspectives of the traditional Chinese literature, western literature and different religion. Therefore, we can further study the similarities and differences in their views of death.Chapter Four is the conclusion that makes a summary and evaluation of Pu Songling’s and Edgar Allan Poe’ s fictional works and illustrates the practical significance and the value of the studies.