Unique Point Of View And Distinguished Language

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, a masterpiece of permanent artistic charm, has been viewed as one of the greatest novels in Victorian time and capable of competing with the great plays of Shakespeare in English literature. For more than one and a half centuries, its rich themes and peculiar artistic style have aroused great interest among critics. They have given wide and deep discussion about the themes, images, structure, feministic and modernistic issues of the novel from perspectives of sociology, psychology, ethics, religion etc. Yet so far no monograph has discussed systematically the novel from perspective of stylistics. In consideration of this, the author of this thesis tries to give a respectively comprehensive and systematic analysis of Wuthering Heights from the new perspective—stylistics. As we know, stylistics puts emphasis on observing how the writer expresses and strengthens the theme and achieves the aesthetic effect by the choice of language. So this thesis hopes to provide objective evidence for the novel's aesthetic value through describing and analyzing the chosen point of view and linguistic features and their stylistic effects, thus enabling readers to better understand and appreciate the subject's significance and artistic value. Moreover, the paper makes an attempt in broadening the approach of investigating the novel, and proves that the development of pragmatics provides a set of new theories and methods for stylistic analysis as well as a new scientific basis on which we could understand and appreciate the literary text. The thesis is composed of three parts: an Introduction, two Chapters and a Conclusion. The " Introduction" gives a general survey of the critical literature of Wuthering Heights, especially of the point of view and language of the novel. And this part also explains the main frame of this thesis. "Chapter one" focuses on discussing the points of view in Wuthering Heights and the stylistic effects they create. It points out that the use of multi-level points of view, especially the use of double narration in Wuthering Heights, makes this classical literary work look like a modern art of 20th century, and it has unusual significance for the story in the novel. Moreover, the author of this thesis puts Lockwood, a narrator ignored by critics for a long time, and Nelly Dean, a principal narrator in Wuthering...