The Use of Symbolism in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher

Abstract

This study is an attempt to analyze the use of symbolism in Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher. It aims to cast light on the motives behind the use of such figure of speech in this story. This work is divided into four chapters. The First Chapter presents a general survey of the main figures of speech. The Second Chapter embodies theoretical background about symbolism and its major theories such as; Sigmund Freud, De Saussure and Whitehead theories of symbolism. The Third Chapter contains the literary analysis of the corpus which we are going to spot light on, studying the Romantic and the gothic styles. The Fourth Chapter deals with some prominent illustrations and the analysis of the symbols in the story