A Stylistic Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe\'s the Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe is indeed one of the most influential writer, critic, poet and editor in American history and very well-known, in the literature world. With his "Gothic" style of writing, The Black Cat is considered as one of his best works. Stylistics is a discipline that studies style by using modern linguistic theories and methodology. Based on the literary stylistic theories, this paper focuses on analyzing The Black Cat from the following aspects: lexical features, syntactical features, rhetorical features and point of view. By doing so, this paper finds that Allan Poe uses these stylistic devices to create the fear and horror of the gothic story. By means of this gothic style in The Black Cat, Poe conveys the idea that the evil is always punished and implies the eternal moral of humanism which is also important nowadays.