Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe is not only a great successor of European gothic stories, but also an outstanding promoter of American gothic literature. Most of his famous horror stories display a variety of gothic features. This thesis aims to analyze the gothic features of three of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories —The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia, which consists of gothic characters, gothic plots, gothic settings and gothic themes. This exhibits Poe’s superb literary skills and the artistic charm of his horror stories.

Key words: Edgar Allan Poe, horror stories, gothic features

摘 要
  
    埃德加•爱伦•坡不仅是欧洲哥特小说的伟大继承者，更是美国哥特文学的杰出推广者。他的大多数著名的恐怖小说都展现出诸多的哥特式特征。本论文旨在通过对《黑猫》、《厄舍府崩塌记》以及《丽姬娅》这三部短篇小说的研究，分析爱伦•坡的哥特小说的多方面特色，包括哥特式主人公、哥特式情节、哥特式背景和哥特式主题。本论文进而展现了埃德加•爱伦•坡在文学创作上的高超手法以及他创作的恐怖小说的艺术魅力。

关键词：埃德加•爱伦•坡；恐怖小说；哥特式特点

1. Introduction
The word “gothic” bears several meanings. As a literary concept, gothic refers to a main literature style during 1760 to 1820. It starts with a famous novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which is later added by a subtitle— A Gothic Story. Thereafter, this kind of horror stories is called gothic novels. Gothic novels usually take old castles, ruins, or wilderness as background, with the stories mostly happening in the past, especially in the medieval period, the plots being horrific, stimulating, and often full of murder, violence, revenge, rape, and even supernatural powers such as ghosts, demons, and the atmosphere being gloomy, mysterious, horrible, and filled with suspense. With Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto achieving a great success, many writers imitated him in a rush, bringing in a series of good gothic novels to the literary world, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797) and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). The gothic novels play an important role in British literary world, and have profound influences on the writers in Germany and America, with Edgar Allan Poe being one of them, who combines the exploration of psychology and morality organically and makes them the core of American gothic novel.