The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

He tries to make it clear that horror comes from our soul. In his works, he reveals people’s horror towards super nature, nothingness, death, evil and disintegration of personality. To a certain degree, Poe’s horror fiction prepares the origin of Southern fiction. He inherits and develops the tradition Gothic fiction, and the American literature forms the background of his horror fictions and gives his fictions unique power and charm. The American author Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) is just one master of the literary genre known as the Gothic story, and he makes great contribution to Gothic fiction. Gothic Stories are romantic tales of terror and the supernatural, which rely a great deal on scene and setting to convey a sense of horror to the reader. Gothic, Horror, Sublime, Aesthetic Function This paper borrowing a critical perspective of Gothic tradition and theory of the sublime, tries to analyze the Gothicism in this novel to detect its aesthetic feature. It presents terrifying atmosphere, the dark plot, and man’s psychological terror to reveal the process of disintegration and annihilation of human mind, thus offering readers specific aesthetic perception through psychological shocks. The Fall of the House of Usher is Poe’s classical piece of this type. Con- sequently, he adopts Gothic technique in a composition, taking a full advantage of Gothic subject matter, plot and elements and lingering on violence, murder, insanity and collapse. He stands alone with his aesthetic taste and writing principle, engaged in the morbid theme of nightmare, death, crime and evil. Received 27 December 2014 accepted 15 January 2015 published 22 January 2015Įdgar Allan Poe is one of the most unique writers in America. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). Air Force Logistics College, Xuzhou, ChinaĮmail: © 2015 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe