TITLE:
Gothicism in The Fall of the House of Usher
AUTHORS:
Wenfang Pang, Diqiu Wang, Shanshan Hu
KEYWORDS:
Gothic, Horror, Sublime, Aesthetic Function
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Literary Study,
Vol.3 No.1,
January
22,
2015
ABSTRACT: Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most unique writers in America. He stands alone with his aesthetic taste and writing principle, engaged in the morbid theme of nightmare, death, crime and evil. Consequently, 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. The Fall of the House of Usher is Poe’s classical piece of this type. 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. 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.