edgar allan poe 美国文学课件.ppt

* Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) ☆ a great writer of fiction, a poet of the first rank, and a critic of insight ☆ the inventor of the detective-fiction genre ☆ the father of psychoanalytic criticism ☆ contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction ☆ influenced French symbolists and the devotees of art for arts sake” ☆ the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone ☆ The most controversial and most misunderstood° 1. Life ☆ born Edgar Poe in Boston, MA, on January 19, 1809; the second son of of actress Elizabeth Poe and actor David Poe, Jr. ☆ adopted by a wealthy Scottish merchant, John Allan (thus Edgar Allan Poe), who never formally adopted him. ☆entered University of Virginia in 1826; not finished ☆ a cadet in West Point in 1830; a dismissal in 1831 ☆ secretly married Virginia, his cousin, in 1835 ☆ died October 1849 mysteriously; in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance” ; Some said his final words are: “Lord help my poor soul”. 2. Achievements a. an original and an remarkable critic; the greatest journalistic critic of his time ☆ to cash in on his own literary practice to rationalize about literary creations ☆ many original ideas, for example: ★He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. ★Works with obvious meanings cease to be art. ★The writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea. ☆ representative works of criticism: “The Philosophy of Composition” “The Poetic Principle” b. poet: his poetry is “exquisitely refined” ① poetic aesthetics: ⅰlength: Poem should be short; “readable at one sitting” ⅱ motivation: beauty, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader; ⅲ tone: melancholy, “the most legitimate of all the poetic tones” ⅳ