1925

Chen, Weimo. Edgar Allan Poe's fiction. In : Special issue of the Sunken Bell Society = Chen zhong she [ID D34942].
This review differs from early criticism in its conscientious study of all Poe's tales. It is divided into four parts : the development of critical opinion about Poe; Poe's mysticism and terror ; Poe's aesthetic principles; and Poe's influence abroad. According to Chen, Poe's art is 'conscious art', and 'his works are also a record of his own experience', which is nothing like the experience of ordinary people, but 'the extraordinary experience of horror and mystery'. Chen believes that Poe builds up 'a world of his own', in which his imagination was always lingering on death and tombs and the supernatural. On Poe's aesthetic views Chen Wei-mo writes that 'Poe is in pursuit of beauty', and his beauty is inseparable from strangeness on proportion. As a result, Chen believes one can hardly find anything resembling real life, except in 'X-ing a Paragrab' and a few others, in which there is a faint satire of reality. Likewise, 'most of the characters in Poe's tales are illusory'.