An Analysis Of The Fall Of The House Of Usher,A Rose For Emily And And The Mountains Echoed From The Perspective Of Gothic Theory

Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849)is an American poet,novelist and critic in the 19 th century.He is well-known as the master of horror fictions and the father of detective fictions.Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his Gothic writing style.The Fall of the House of Usher is a classic work of Poe.In the novel,the eccentric characters,the depressive tone and the horrible plot all reflect the characteristics Gothic novel.William Faulkner(1897-1962)is one of the most influential writers in American literature.He is an important representative of stream-of-consciousness literature.He is an outstanding American novelist,poet,and playwright in modern and contemporary American literature.In 1949,Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature,which set off a worldwide upsurge of research on Faulkner and his works.His short story A Rose for Emily tells about Miss Emily’s gradual transformation into a murderer under the oppression of the patriarchal society with a grotesque and terrifying tone.In this novel,Faulkner uses Gothic writing techniques to reveal the evil of patriarchal society and the dark side of deep human nature.Khaled Hosseini(1965-)is an Afghan-American best-selling author and physician.The theme of his works are about the Afghan people living in exile.And The Mountains Echoed is the latest novel among “The Hosseini Trilogy” and it depicts betrayal,parting,love,life and death in the context of war by the story one by one to reveal the good side and evil side in human nature.This thesis is divided into five parts.Chapter one is the brief introduction to the three writers and the three works.Chapter two summarizes the current research of The Fall of the House of Usher,A Rose for Emily and And the Mountains Echoed at home and abroad and put forward the significance of this paper.Although the three works span more than a hundred years of American literary history,I found that all the characters,plots and environment descriptions in these works have obvious characteristics of Gothic novels and reveal the evil side of human nature.Therefore,I use Gothic theory to analyze these three works together creatively.Chapter three is the theoretical foundation.Firstly,it introduces the origin and development of Gothic and then introduces the definition and characteristics of Gothic novels.Chapter four is the most important part of this thesis.It analyzes the characters,plots and environment in the three works from the perspective of Gothic theory.The last chapter is the conclusions of the thesis.Through the profound analysis of the three novels,we can realize that the good and evil of human nature are not absolute like black and white.In some certain circumstances,the evil in human nature will be exposed and even generate violent crimes.It enlightens us to think about the constraints on evil in human nature.