In The Light Of Mimetic And Expressive Aesthetics:A Comparative Study Of Pu Songling And Edgar Allan Poe

The comparability of Pu Songling and Edgar Allan Poe lies in their significant literary connections formed in their witness of great social change and unfortunate life experiences,which results in their similarly unconventional literary appreciation of the factor of grotesqueness.Nevertheless,how they respectively manifest the unconventionality in their aesthetics remains undisclosed.The comparative studies of Pu and Poe are few and devoid of profundity in the aspect of aesthetics.In reviewing the existing discussions of Chinese aesthetics and Western aesthetics in which Pu and Poe situate their aesthetic views,one can find that most of them have categorised the former as the expressive type,while the latter,mimetic.The fixed categorisation is easy to be overturned through the comparison of the aesthetic value of Pu and Poe.In one aspect,the parallel exploration of the aesthetics of Pu and Poe reveals that the two fiction writers process their literary works in the light of both mimetic aesthetics and expressive aesthetics,which runs counter to the stereotyped classification that suggests the fixation of the two writers' aesthetics into a single type.In their mimetic aesthetics,Pu is devoted to portraying the social reality,while Poe is interested in the abstracted idea of Beauty.The expressive aesthetics of Pu and Poe indicates that Pu holds a firm belief in the concept of “authenticity” and directly expresses his real emotion,that is,the discontent with the reality,while Poe in his literary works implicitly mourns the dead women in his life and tries to build an emotional connection with his readers with such a topic.In another aspect,the analysis of the non-conventional aesthetics of the two writers suggests that they have respectively challenged the initially accepted signification of expressive theories and mimetic theories,and for that,they have also broken off the fixed definition of the two aesthetic modes in history.Pu constructs a fictional world to express his indignation and thus differs from the conventional standard—being calm and reserved—for a cultivated Chinese scholar in temperament.With a similarly revolutionary spirit as Pu,Poe is unsatisfied with the inspiration of the Muse in mimetic practices.Instead,he stresses the consciousness and autonomy of writers in literary composition.On the basis of the above analysis,the conclusion is made that the aesthetic parallel between Pu and Poe thus firstly serves as a supplement to the insufficient studies on the two fiction writers,secondly reflects the influence of social background and personal experiences on the aesthetics of the two writers,and finally helps to prove wrong the classification that the Chinese aesthetics is expressive,while the Western aesthetics,mimetic.