SuspenseRelatedtotheDeathofBeautyinEdgarPoe’sShortStories

毕业论文〔设计)1.IntroductionEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849),the famous American poet,short story writer,anda critic,is one of the greatest figures in 19th century American literature.Being inpoverty in his whole life,he wrote many sentimental poems in beautiful melody,expressing his melancholy in The Raven,Annabel Lee,To Helen or Ulalume.He wasa creative short story writer.People consider him as"the father of the detective story".Meanwhile,his horror and crime short stories are famous.Ligeia shows us the powerof the supernatural;in The Fall of the House of Usher,everything is going to be mad;The Black Cat reveals the dark side of human mind;The Murders in the Rue Morgueis the representations of Dupin's wisdom,etc.No matter what theme Poe wrote on inhis short stories,Gothic Romanticism is their great feature because Poe lived in theage of American Romanticism;and Poe combined the traditional Gothic with hisdescriptions of human psyche.Poe is an expert in writing short stories with suspense,and formulated his own principle of writing,which is applied to most of his shortstories.We can see that he conveys "the unity of effect"in The Masque of the RedDeath,William Wilson and so on.In his philosophy of composition,"the death of abeautiful woman is,unquestionably,the most poetical topic in the world"(Edgar AllanPoe,2004:135).With this eccentric and morbid theme,he wrote two interrelatedfamous short stories-Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher-in which death ofbeauty is depicted with techniques of expression.One of them is suspense.For thisreason,this thesis will focus on suspense in these two short stories,showing how2