Edgar Allen Poe作者写作风格及代表作简介.docx

Edgar Allen Poe作者写作风格及代表作简介Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) is a master of the suspenseful short story. He is also a poet and the first great critic of America. Poe was born in Boston, gifted but tormented. His life was precarious, frequently destitute and completely impoverished. He worked for several magazines and joined the staff of the New York Mirror newspaper in 1844. All the while, he was battling a drinking problem. After the Mirror published his poem “The Raven” in January 1845, Poe achieved national and international fame. He was an inventor of a new symbolic poetry, the new short story in the detective and science fiction, an important artistic theory and analytical criticism. Poe was brilliantly talented, intellectually untrained, and socially displaced. His themes and his view was shaped by the French symbolist poets. He was not popular in America until the 20th century because his view was ahead of his time. In the 20th century, he became a major romantic writer in America, very popular with Freudian psychological critics. Poe's literary theory lies in poetry and fiction. His poetry is the creation of beauty and the tone of sadness. His short poems are the level of emotion. The most potential topic of his poetry is the death of a beautiful woman. The object of poetry is pleasure. Music is an essential part of his poetry. Poe's fiction presents 70 tales of wonder or horror, wit or humor, reflection or ratiocination and the deductive skill. He is the first to develop the short story as a distinctive art form, unity of impression and brevity. His fiction focuses on the effect first and then the incidents. He believes the merit of a work of art is its psychological effect upon the reader and that writer should subordinate everything to effect. Poe cared about effect, not ideas. His subjects and themes of both poetry and fiction are either universal or exotic. His fiction is the earliest American detective fiction and science fiction. Poe is also a pioneering aesthetician, psychological investigator, and literary technician. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of his major works. The central theme is terror that arises from the complexity and multiplicity of forces that shape human destiny. Dreadful, horrifying events result not from a single, uncomplicated circumstance but from a collision and intermingling of manifold, complex circumstances. In Poes story, the House of Usher falls to ruin for the reasons listed under "Other Themes". From the very beginning, the narrator realizes that he is entering a world of mystery when he crosses the tarn bridge. He observes, "What was itI paused to thinkwhat was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher ? It was a mystery all insoluble."󰀀