The Detailed Analysis of 'the Black Cat' by Edgar Allan Poe in Stylistic Perspective

Abstract

As a discipline embracing both language and literature works, stylistics has been a great focus to many researches for many years. Dating back to rhetoric, stylistics paves the way for having different views in analyzing literary works. In its broadest sense, stylistics could be defined as a scientific branch to analyze the style of a literary figure within a linguistic framework. Situated within this field, the present paper sets out to investigate the style of Edgar Allan Poe as reflected in his short story “The Black Cat”. The method followed in the study is Leech and Short (1981) method that focuses on lexical, grammatical, figurative, contextual and cohesive aspects in the literary works. Findings obtained through the careful analysis of the texts have potential to contribute to the understanding of Poe’s style as a literary figure. Accordingly, his deliberate choices in punctuations, his lexical choices mostly reflecting his gift in writing, his repetitive use of words arousing fear and dread in the reader, and his skillful use of figures of speech could be considered as among the distinctive aspects of Poe’s style.