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Poe’s reputation mainly comes from his horror fiction, and The Black Cat is one of his classic masterpieces which not only inherits the atmosphere, scene and theme of Gothic novel but also develops the Gothic novel. In this novel, The protagonist who used to be gentle and kind becomes short-tempered and cruel because of the alcohol and begins to abuse animals and his wife at home for no reason. One evening, the protagonist got drunk and cruelly cut one of the black cat Pluto’s eyes. Later, in cool blood, the protagonist hung the cat to a tree. However, the desire of wanting to be evil for evil’s sake only seems to make the protagonist get some pleasure. Later, the protagonist’s conscience suddenly found, he adopted another black cat which was almost identical to Pluto to replace the former one, but soon he became disgusted with the cat. One day, in the process of getting rid of the black cat, the protagonist killed his wife accidentally and built his wife’s body into the basement walls. When the police were searching for his wife in his house, suddenly from the walls came a bloodcurdling roar. Breaking the wall, the police found that a black cat standing on a head of a rotting body. After reading the novel, it is difficult to calm down our trembling heart, which is right the literary effect that Poe wants to convey to the readers .
2. Literature Review
In the contemporary context of globalization and interdisciplinary, the research visual field of Allan Poe has been more vast. History, politics, economy, arts, race and gender have become the research topics of Poe, presenting the situation of “across disciplines, focusing on culture” which has close relationship with people’s cultural life. However, the study on Poe’s inheritance and development of Gothic novel is still limited to Poe’s creative skills and themes which have been recognized, forming a relatively fixed mode.
2.1 Review of Domestic Studies
Since the late ninety of the 20th century, Chinese academic community has gradually shown the pomp of the contention of a hundred schools of thoughts on the study of Poe. And the studies on Poe’s novels can be pided into the following perspectives.
The first kind is studied from the angle of detective novel. The thesis Gothic style in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story written by Li Xueqin concludes that Poe had promoted the development and innovation of Gothic literature on the basis of inheriting the essence of Gothic literature, which has far-reaching significance.
The second is the research on female image in Poe’s works. The paper Analysis on Female Images in Edgar Allan Poe’ s Horror Fiction written by Qin LiJuan concludes that the death of Poe’s mother and wife makes Poe have an almost obsessive love for the death of a beautiful woman. “He did not believe that death was the end of life, instead, he thought that the dead relatives at the last gasp could communicate with the living.” (Wei Beibei, 2012:46)
The third kind is the study on Poe’s humor novel. While Chinese study on Poe is rarely “humorous”. “This is probably because critics do not know enough about Poe’s novels, especially the American humor.” (Cao Minglun, 2009: 67-68) The paper Origin of Allan Poe’s Humor Novels written by Zhu Zhenwu concludes that Poe not only skillfully uses the material of native American comic stories but also inherits the narrative mode, which helps Poe create the unique style of writing.
In addition to the above three categories, there are studies from other perspectives, such as narrative techniques, psychological analysis and so on.
Compared to the study of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and some other literature masters, our country’s study on Poe relatively lags behind in recent years. These studies which mainly focus on the general information, author introduction, artistic characteristics and analysis on works are very limited.