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Bibliography 17
1 Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is an important American south writer during the Romantic Period. He has been worldly recognized as the precursor of modernistic writings, originator of short stories, forerunner of psychoanalytic criticism and father of modern detective stories who exerted a substantial influence on American and world literature. Yet he was neglected by his native countrymen during his woeful lifetime. Poe wrote many detective tales in his lifetime and much research work has been devoted to Poe’s detective tales. With respect to his detective reasoning stories, the research becomes comparatively rare though it is well acknowledged that Poe initiated the narrative pattern of detective stories: case-spying-reasoning-solving and the triangle relationship of character: detective-narrator-vulgar police concerning the three detective stories which feature his amateur Dupin and have inspired countless imitators, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
The facts that Poe has exerted enormous influences on a variety of later authors and that there is always a touch of the mysterious in most of his short stories that grips the hearts of his reader may account for consistent interests in the study of his works at home and abroad. Widely as the investigations have been passed on Poe, the approaches usually fall into two categories: psychological and biographical. Take a general view of Poe’s works that many critics and scholars may focus on, nearly for half a century, they mainly concentrate on the study of the tales of mystery and horror, such as The Fall of the Usher House, The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Ligeia, The Tell-tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, The Masque of the Red Death, Berenice, the tales of humor and satire, for example, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq, How to Write a Blackwood Article, A Predicament, Loss of Breath, The Man that Was Used Up, The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, X-ing a Paragrab (12 May 1849), The Business Man (February 1840), Four Beasts in One, and the tales of flights and fantasies, such as The Balloon-Hoax, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, King Pest, The Oval Portrait, etc.
In fact, Edgar Allan Poe, with his genius and peculiar talents, created over 50 poems and nearly 70 short stories, however, some of his works have not got enough attention in our academic circles, for instance, the short story The Man of the crowd, one of Poe’s masterpieces full of modern meaning, is the obvious example. The Man of the Crowd is a short story tinged with Poe’s biography, in which Poe truly elaborates and represents different kinds of people who shuttling back and forth the streets of London. Poe’s description not only represents the modern people’s barren spirit and emotional loneliness which owing to the human nature being distorted and alienated by the modern industrial civilization, but also embodies Poe’s profound anxiety and infinite care for the survival plight and the crisis development of human being. Based on Poe’s biography and the text reading, this thesis attempts at the using of psychological theory, Poe’s aesthetic theory, the theory of effect and cultural theory to analyze The Man of the Crowd from the aspects of dual theme, dual art and symbolism, and identifies how they were used by Poe to structure the text.
1.1 The Brief Introduction of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts to parents who were struggling traveling actor. Poe’s lifetime was of great misfortune. He lost both his parents at the age of two and was taken care of by John Allan—a wealthy merchant of Virginia. The Allans failed to offer the orphan a normal home and Poe enjoyed nothing but an unhappy relationship together. Most of Poe’s education was in England from 1815 to 1820. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia and left after one year because of gambling debts. In 1827 Poe joined the U. S. Army as a common soldier under assumed name and age. In 1830 he entered West Point and was dishonorably dismissed next year for intentional disobedience of orders. In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemon who died in 1842, and he took to drinking and drugs and died in loneliness, poverty, intoxication and illness in 1849.