An Analysis Of Irony In Persuasion-An Adaptation Theory Approach

The application of linguistic theories to literary appreciation promotes the emergence and rapid development of literary pragmatics which focuses on the interactive study process of literary creation and literary appreciation. Literature is a kind of language art which portrays images to reflect the social life. Excellent literary works of an age are miniatures of that era and symbols of the culture and spirit. Persuasion is the Austen's last novel which is regarded as the most profound and mature novel of Austen. Persuasion presents some new features compared with Austen's previous novels which dedicate Austen's change of writing style in her twilight years. These new characteristics of the novel reveal the change of the society and Austen's thoughts. As the basic tone of the novel, irony plays significant roles in portraying images, organizing plots and reflecting the theme of the novel. The previous study of Persuasion focused on the ideological content or rhetorical style of the novel from the perspective of literary criticism. How to interpret it from the pragmatic perspective is of great importance and great need.The Adaptation Theory which integrates social, culture and cognitive factors comprehensively provides a new perspective to the analysis of irony. The Adaptation Theory has great explanatory power to many complicated language phenomena such as code-switching, fussy language, advertising language and so on. As such an explanatory theory, the Adaptation Theory should fulfill its role in literature literary criticism and literature appreciation.This thesis analyzes the irony in Persuasion under the framework of the Adaptation Theory to explore the close relation between the strategic choice of irony and the society and culture. To systemically analyze the novel, the language material is divided into micro irony and macro irony. Micro irony refers to the ironic utterance between the characters of the novel. To fulfill the communicative needs, the characters of the novel choose the strategy of irony to express their emotions and feelings. This choice is made as adaptation to the contextual correlates and the process is dynamic. The macro irony means the author's ironic narration and the structural ironies of the whole novel which is made by the author as adaptation to the social reality, the author's emotion and the author's real intention of writing the novel.This thesis tries to offer a systemic pragmatic account of irony in Persuasion to prove the explanatory power of the Adaptation Theory for irony in literary works, and also to gain a better understanding of Persuasion and Jane Austen's brilliant art of irony.