Gothicism In Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories

This paper is devoted to the condensed study of Gothicism in Poe's four short classics,—"The Masque of the Red Death","The Black Cat","The Pit and the Pendulum", and"The Fall of the House of Usher". Despite Poe's seemingly inheritance from some literary forebears, his contribution and innovation for the literary subgenre is profound and significant.The origin term of"Gothic"can be traced back to"Goth", the notorious barbarous people of an old Germanic tribe."Gothicism"develops gradually to indicate a grotesque style in architecture prevailing in the Middle Ages of Europe and later it is used in literature to convey the idea of"Dark Romanticism"that is excluded by the Classicists from the mainstream of the literatus. Gothic literature starts from the eighteenth century in England, and gradually forms a special school in literary world. Among the numerous celebrated Gothic classics, Edgar Allan Poe's fiction remains the most grotesque and unique.Compared to the other Gothic writers, Poe deepens the connotation of Gothic by exploring the themes of death, guilt, revenge, incest and morbid psyche as well as the supernatural mystery in these tales. Poe intends to psychologize the Gothic and has commenced to modify the traditional Gothic relationship, in which the direction of horrifying averts from outside to inside, from setting to self. The characters are more likely creative originator of the terrifying rather than passive victims or witnesses of their appalling plight, while the circumstances are merely the products of their imaginative mind. It is with Poe that the old"German"Gothic is finally brought into the...