A Stylistics Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poem “The Raven”文献综述

 2022-08-15 10:40:06

Literature Review

  1. Introduction

The life of Edgar Allan Poe presents almost as much as mystery, drama, melancholy, and in some cases fiction as his tales and poems do. His personal image, in present views, is closely associated with many characters that he portrays in his works: gloomy, nervous, dark. That, however, never eclipses his talents in literature. Poersquo;s contributions to American literature are almost immeasurable. He is widely regarded as the central character in the American Romantic Movement, and is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of macabre and mystery.

Poe is also recognized as a literary critic. His poetic theories are best elucidated in his “The philosophy of Composition” and “The poetic Principle”. Poe prefers short poems that are readable at “a single sitting”. He adheres to the view that beauty is the chief, eternal theme in poetry. It is highly manifested in the tone of melancholy, and death is its best container. He stresses rhythm, defining true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”, and declares that “music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of poetry.” Poe is unabashed to offer his own poem “The Raven” as an illustration of his style and he says that “it is the greatest poem that was ever written.”

“The Raven” is a narrative poem. It tells of a talking ravenrsquo;s sudden visit to a distraught lover, slowly driving him crazy, at a dreary midnight. The lover is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Perching upon a bust of Pallas, the raven leads the lover into madness with its constant repetition of the word “Nevermore”. The length of the poem is one hundred and eight lines, maintaining totality and unity of poetic effect not below the critical taste. As mentioned, Poe sticks to death and beauty as cores of poetry. Thus, the combination of beauty and death—a beautiful womanrsquo;s death—is undoubtedly the most poetical topic in the world. Gloom and melancholy descend upon the loverrsquo;s narrow chamber for the loss of Lenore. Through Poersquo;s refined rhythm and structure, sorrow and despair are escalating. And the bereaved lover, who goes through the everything as the protagonist, even exaggerates these feelings after the ravenrsquo;s each repeated answer “Nevermore”.

Therefore, this paper aims to analyze this from the perspective of stylistic analysis. The analysis is made under the aspects of lexical, grammatical, semantic, and phonological patterns. Through interpreting the functions of figures of speech, such as tropes and schemes, this research is helpful to analyze the structure and style of Poersquo;s poetry, and his themes, views, and treatment of beauty and love.

  1. Review

The analysis of literary style goes back to the study of classical rhetoric, though modern stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism and the related Prague School, which commits to phonology, of the early twentieth century.

Roman Jacobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School. He brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in his works. His argument was that the study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics.

Michael Halliday is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. One of Hallidayrsquo;s contributions has been the use of the term “register” to explain the connections between language and its context. For Halliday “register” is distinct from “dialect”. “Dialect” refers to the habitual language of a particular user in a specific geographical or social context. “Register” describes the choices made by the user. And choices depend on three variables: field, tenor, and mode.

Flower comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary. The linguist David Crystal pints out that Hallidayrsquo;s “tenor” stands as a roughly equivalent term for “style”, which is a more specific alternative used by linguists to avoid ambiguity. Hallidayrsquo;s third category “mode” is what he refers to as the symbolic organization of the situation. William Downes recognizes two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the genre of the text. Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, which predetermines the selection of textual meanings.

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