爱伦坡的恐怖小说及其美学意蕴(2)
4.1 Symbol 9
4.2 Suspense 10
4.3 Open Ending 11
5 Conclusion 13
Bibliography15
1 Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most outstanding writers in America. However, he has been misunderstood by most of his readers and his contemporaries for quite a long period of time because of his unique writing techniques and literary theories are totally different from the main stream in the field of literature at that time. Many great writers in America of his same age often use a romantic tone in their literary works, while Poe's themes are mainly about killing, violence, death, nightmare and evil.
Although Poe’s writing style and literary works could not be commonly accepted in America, they gained great success in Europe and Latin America. Baudelaire, Swinburne, Bernard Shaw and many other great writers all appreciated and spoke highly of his works. Poe's great influence spread all over the world from France. Subsequently, many scholars started to discuss and did researches on his works. His fictions and poems have also been translated into Chinese. As a result, Pu Songling and many other Chinese writers are greatly influenced by his writing style and created countless masterpieces. Today, Poe’s status as a master in literature has been recognized by people from the entire world. He is now regarded as the originator of the short stories, the forerunner of modernistic writings and father of modern detective stories. Poe had made indelible contributions to American literature.
The greatest contribution Edgar Allan Poe made to American literature is his short story. He had written over 70 short stories through his life and horror story can be regarded as his most important works. The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat, Ligeia, William Wilson, The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death are the most famous. Although it has been recognized by all that his horror stories have made great contributions to the development of American literature, Poe couldn’t get acknowledgement from his contemporary writers, due to his unique creating techniques and writing style as well as personal values and principles. His dark and terror-inspiring subjects were considered to be crazy, and the aesthetic implication in his horror stories were by no means appreciated under that cultural circumstances, as death and horror haven't been widely accepted as a kind of aesthetic concept yet. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine how hard it is for him to gain the understanding and appreciation of his contemporaries.
It was not until the 20th century did scholars pay adequate attention to the value of Poe's works. From then on, Poe’s status in literature started to rise, and there was a persistently overheating focus on his literary works. A mania of discussing and studying his poems and novels started all over the world, various literary theories were employed in the researches into his works and the aesthetic implication in his horror stories started to draw people’s attention and was further appreciated.
This thesis is going to talk about the features of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories, such as dark and terror-inspiring subjects, sense of callousness, return of the entombed, abnormal characters and gothic setting. By adopting a variety of examples, this thesis will reveal the aesthetic implication of such “horrible” art. It will also illustrate experience of excitement and beauty of astonishment demonstrated in his works by introducing Freud's theory about dreams and Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauty. At last, by analyzing the details of Poe’s horror stories, we can see the writing methods Poe adopts to create a world of darkness and the aesthetic effect he has achieved in his works.
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