The Beautiful Blooming Of The Flower Of Horror

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most unique writers in America. Many men of letters in America of his same age depicted an America in its childhood by adopting a romantic tone, while Poe's themes were mainly about killing,violence,death,nightmare and evil. He always disclosed the alienation and isolation between human and the world around them and the terror of the cruel society by using the gothic horror and grotesquery. Under the social and cultural background at that time in America, it's not long for the death and horror enter people's aesthetic vision. We can imagine how hard it is for Poe to gain the understanding and appreciation of his contemporaries. As his creative techniques and literary theories are totally different from the main stream in the field of literature in his time, Poe had been misunderstood by readers and his contemporaries for quite a long time. It was until the 20^th century that the importance of Poe's literary creations had been recognized extensively by the academic world.Part One is an introduction, in which I briefly introduce Poe's literary status, the reason that Poe chose to write gothic from the three aspects: his life experiences; influence from the British gothic novel; influence from American literature traditions, and then a literature review on the study of Poe both home and abroad.Part Two presents an investigation of the aesthetic value of horror in western traditional aesthetic theory. In this part, I first look back to the origin of aesthetics, then I analyze why horror can be taken as an aesthetic subject mainly from three aspects: What is ugly is also beautiful; Aristotle's theory of tragedy; Burke's theory of sublimity and beauty. Lastly I get the conclusion of this part: the power of horror is to cause the delights of pain in human soul.Part Three presents the types of horror in Poe's gothic fictions. After reading Poe's works we always feel an unspeakable horror from our soul, so what are we frightened at? This problem has not been analyzed particularly, most of the analysis just stops at the surface. In this part I will explore the horror from human soul from the stand point of Poe's view of universe. Horror is a kind of instinct, is one of the most strong feelings of human kind. In Poe's story, we can feel the horror to supernatural in "MS. Found in a Bottle"; the horror to death in "The Premature Burial"; the horror to evil of human nature in "The Black Cat"; but among all these different kinds of horror, nothingness is most horrible. Human can be frightened at the tangible monsters, or be frightened at crimes in reality, but the degree of being frightened can not be compared to the horror to nothingness. We can experience the inherent innominate and enormous horror in Poe's works.Part Four is to connect the theory with the text analysis and analyze what kind of aesthetic values are produced from the horror of Poe's gothic fiction: horror produces sublimity; horror brings purification of human soul.Part Five presents the means Poe adopted to achieve the aesthetic effects in his fictitious texts. By means of symbol, suspense, first person narrator, exaggeration of atmosphere and open ending, Poe tried his best to construct an intact and uniform, mysterious and shaking effect.According to the analysis above, we come to such a conclusion: since horror brings us so much pain, why there are still so many people infatuated in Poe's gothic fictions? Because we can find beauty from horror and experience the aesthetic pleasure. In terms of this, horror is beautiful and pleasant. Poe's gothic fictions offer the enjoyment of beauty for the readers and made his own particular contribution to the world literary history.