On The Gothic Fiction Of Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the most independent writers in the history of American literature.His gothic fictions present a morbid color of life and death, evil and dream.Poe's gothic fictions not only highlighted the value of the horrifying atmosphere, the narration of fantasy plot, the creation of bizarre, abnormal image,but also pushed the "gothic" to a higher level.On one hand,he was the first writer to describe psychological horror,to dig into human subconscious, to cast the external terror into the internal throughthe process of psychological change,and to dig further into the characters' distort, dreadful and many other psychological feelings.His gothic world is imbued with the glorious atmosphere of grotesque and bizarre.On the other hand, he applies the gothic elements to moral introspection, humorous irony, speculative philosophy, and other fields.The gothic horror is deeply buried in the structure of the context and ideological implication of his humor, mystery fictions and science fiction. Gothic, as an approach to present mental horror, has been put into full practice in his fiction.This thesis aims to illustrate two aspects of problems.One is the reasons for Poe's choosing Gothic as a writing method. The other is how Poe putsGothic into his writing practice.Therefore, based on Poe's cosmology, his view on life-death, as well as his literary poetics on literature and art displayed in his essays, this thesis adopts the technique of close reading to analyze comprehensivelyhis gothic fiction. Specifically, the analysis of the fiction gothic elements and their effect will contribute to the display the whole picture of the gothic world in his complete work; it will also point out the intrinsic connectionbetween the philosophical world and the text world. Moreover, it will discussPoe'sinnovation in the fiction narratology theory, aesthetic theory specifically in the history of gothic literature in order to decode the mystery of his work and make a fair and comprehensive evaluation.This thesis is divided into three chapters.The introduction part briefly introduces the reason for this thesis' s topic and the significance, and makes a literature review home and abroad on this topic. The first section of the first chapter mainly introduces the historical origin and development of Gothic as well as theorigin, characteristics and aesthetic value of gothic fiction. It clarifiesthat Poe's adoption of gothic lies within the context of the tradition of the gothic fiction, and at the same time, he made an innovation on gothic fiction by casting the external horror into the internal mind through the process of psychological changes. The second section describes Poe's tough life, reveals the shadow of death around the genius, and summarizes his contribution to the history of literary criticism, the Impact Aesthetics. It points out the inner connection between the life of Poe, his literary thought and the gothic writing. The third section makes a definition and a brief introduction on Poe's gothic fiction and analyzes the psychological horror as the most prominent feature of his works, which is displayed respectively in the aspect of content and narrative and rhetoric methods.In the second and three chapter, based on the subject matters and the adoption of gothic elements, this thesis makes a classification of his sixty-six short fictions and three medium-length fictions.Choose fifteen horror and mystery fictions depicting death and highlighting its narration, six moral self-reflection fiction reflecting the self and analyzing the mind, eight humor and sarcastic fiction depicting cheating and devils and nine intellectual and philosophical fiction full of philosophical conversation and rigorous reasoning. Then the thesis analyzes the presentation of the Gothic landscape of Poe's fiction from the perspectives of content and narrative and rhetoric methods. Chapter two mainly focuses on the content of psychological horror in Poe's Gothic, including the thematic event, character image and his view on life. Chapter three elaborates on Poe's adoption of narrative and rhetoric method to present his own gothic landscape, including the narratology, the combination with humor and the dialogical style. Due to the ideal effects achieved through the atmosphere, time-space mechanism, the pronoun mechanism and rhetoric methods, Poe successfully creates typical characters, pushes his psychological gothic into climax and brings great aesthetic pleasure to his readers.In the conclusion chapter, the thesis points out that the characteristics of Poe's psychological Gothic lies in his innovation in the content and narrative and rhetoric method of his fictions.Within the context of the tradition of Gothic fiction and Poe's own view of literature,the general characteristics of Poe's Gothic fictions can be summarized as follows: the breaking of the fixed mode of the traditional gothic fiction, the proper hiding of moral lessons,the promoting of the important shift of American gothic fiction, the revealing of the modern consciousness and the unity of effect achieved in his short fictions.Poe's distinctive gothic fictions promote the development of the Dark Romanticism.