A stylistic analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories: "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"

As a recently blossomed field, stylistics has been a great focus to language and literature researches. Although its origin dates back to rhetoric, the term "modern stylistics" is considered to be emerging in the world of literature. 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 of study, the present research sets out to investigate the style of Edgar Allan Poe as reflected in his "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart". The method followed in the study is Leech and Short (2004) 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.