An Analysis Of The Images In Edgar Allan Poe's Horror Tales: From The Perspective Of The Schema Theory

For quite a long time, the images in horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe have been one of the focuses of the literary criticism. Most of the critics consider the image only as a narration means which performs as the symbol and hint in the horror tales. The functions of images in the readers'understanding are neglected. The Schankian schema theory points out that text understanding is in fact the result of the interactions between the readers'default schemata and the text, yielding certain effects on readers'schemata. On the other hand, the image in the tales is not the simple object, but the colligation of the concrete objects and the emotions represented by them. The image is the inseparable part of the text. And the understanding of the image should be under the context of the text. In this study, the images taken from the horror tales of Poe are divided into three types according to their respective properties: the scene images, the object images, and the animal images. The scene images include the castle image and the catacomb image, etc; the object images include the gallows image and the clock image, etc; the animal images include the cat image, the vulture image and the serpent image, etc. For each image, their schematic interpretations are represented in terms of the Schankian schema theory. The interactions between the schemata in image, the default schemata and other schemata in the texts and the coherence built up by them are also analyzed. Through the schemata interpretations of images in Poe's horror tales, it is found that they do not just perform as the symbol and hint. On the contrary, they all have very close connections with the human physical experience and the booklore, i.e. the images activate the default schemata in readers'minds, and have the interactions with other schemata in the texts. In this way, the meaning of the images and the themes of the horror tales are understood.