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1.1 The Previous Study of Poe’s Tales of Humour
Throughout works about study on Poe’s humour, what can be found is that a few scholars gradually shift their attention from Poe’s eccentric stories to Poe’s humour. And what they have in common is that they prefer to analyze Poe’s humor combined with concrete texts. This practice, to a large extent, can avoid emptiness and dullness caused by “pure theories”. Nevertheless, problems can also be discovered in the previous study of Poe’s tales of humor: 1) As a whole, experts and scholars lay much more emphasis on tales of horror discussing fright, murder, revenge, death than works revealing Poe’s unique humour, which results in fewer available documents. 2) Contents about Poe’s humour still remain at a prelimary stage, and research results are not profound and detailed enough, which urge us to further our study on it. As regards articles on Poe’s humor, most of them are concerned about either reasons contributing to his creation of tales of humor, or a general overview of his humorous stories, but they scarcely touch upon systematic study on Poe’s humor. 3) The concrete texts of Poe’s tales of humour are barely studied and elaborated in detail such as in respect of his figure of speech, depiction of character and environment and so on. To sum up, the previous study on Poe’s humour is limited and superficial.
1.2 Research Design
This paper mainly deals with the topic centering on Poe’s humour, attempting to attract the public’s attention not to Poe’s gothic and detective novels but to his tales of humour and making people be aware that he is not only good at describing terrifying contents, but also gifted for depicting humorous stories full of profound and thought-provoking messages worthy of repeated reflection. Meanwhile, with one of Poe’s typical stories named Some Words with A Mummy, this paper will give a detailed description of this text, analyzing its style, figure of speech, characterization, etc. with a view to showing how Poe’s humour is embodied in the text and what Poe tries to convey behind his unique humour.
2. The Shared Qualities in Poe’s Humour
2.1 Humour and Tales of Humor
The word “humour” originates from Latin word “humor”. Two thousand years ago, this word is a physiological term, referring to human “humor”. (Ye Qi, 1998: 40) With the progress of human society, the meaning of this word is continuously widening. In Encyclopedia Britannica (the 1st edition in 1771), definition of humour cannot be clearly given, so here only two annotations: (1) Humour: see Fluid; (2) Humour: see Wit. “Fluids”, namely “humor”, the doctor Hippocrates of ancient Greek argues that there are four fluids in human body—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, which control human health and emotion, and form four types of temperament—quality of bile, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic. From the medieval century to current age, the supposition that the different combinations of these four fluids affect human physique, temperament, psychology as well as disposition has a profound influence. At the latter of 17th century, The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definitions of humor: a. Behavior, Speech or Quality of Article, they are amusing. Weird, Witty, Funny, Ludicrous, Interesting. b. Ability to perceive what is ridiculous and ability to amuse people, expressed in speech, writing or others. Since 18th century, the meaning of humour spreads across the whole world, and the word humour has its own form in different countries. For example, French humour, German humor, Japaneseユ—モア. As regards humor in China, Etymology (Revised Edition, 1979) explains: “Humor is what we calls interest and meaningfulness.” And The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Language (Revised Edition, 1980) describes: “Aesthetic noun. By means of figures of speech like innuendo, allegory, pun and through kindly smile, incongruity and unreasonableness in life are revealed.