Shurma S. Poetics of Image and Symbol in American Gothic Short Story: A Cognitive Perspective (A Study of Short Fiction by E. Poe, A. Bierce and H. Lovecraft)

This paper focuses on determining genre features of imagery and symbolism inherent in Gothic short stories by E. Poe, A. Bierce and H. Lovecraft. Their short stories are studied from a linguopoetical perspective by way of combining conceptual and semiotic approaches to such textual phenomena. As a result, the invariant scheme of text imagery and symbolism interaction, which American Gothic short stories tend to employ, was built up. This scheme provides an access to the hierarchy of verbal poetic images and symbols in the short stories by the three authors. Verbal poetic images in Gothic short stories, which form the lowest level of the hierarchy, further give rise to metaimages represented as conceptual metaphors or metonymies which further interact by way of metonymic substitution of their concept domains. A metonymic component of the image or an artistic detail may foster the emergence of textual symbol as a trope which, along with verbal poetic images and metaimages of different levels, complies with culturally motivated global symbol. Intertextual parallels between the imagery and symbolism of E. Poe’s, A. Bierce’s and H. Lovecraft’s short stories reveal the theme of death as a dominant one among genre characteristics of Gothic short stories.