| Heart of Darkness, written by famous English novelist Joseph Conrad, is one of the most influential novellas in the 20th century with its profound thoughts and remarkable artistry, which has unique narrative structure, profound symbolic meaning and social meaning. This thesis, basing on stylistics of fiction and Halliday's systematic functional stylistics, attempts to explore the stylistic significances of Heart of Darkness from the following three aspects: mind style, metaphor and power relations. Mind style is based on Roger Fowler and Leech & Short's theories on mind style. Metaphor is based on Halliday's grammatical metaphor. Power relations are analyzed through transitivity system under the framework of functional stylistics. There are many reviews and remarks about Heart of Darkness from different angels, such as feminist criticism, symbolism, deconstruction, narrator description and narrative techniques, etc. most of which are from literary form. This thesis attempts to explore the stylistic significances in fiction text, combining the knowledge of functional grammar, functional stylistics and stylistics of fiction, in this way to break a new ground for literary stylistic study.The thesis is composed of three parts:Part1 is the introduction, which presents some theoretical preliminaries concerning Halliday's functional grammar and functional stylistics ,grammatical metaphor, literary stylistics and mind style. In addition, brief introduction about the author, the novella and critical evaluation of the novella are taken into consideration as well.Part 2 is the main body of the thesis. It consists of three chapters. Emphasis is put on chapter1 and chapter 3.Chapter 1 mainly discusses mind style in Heart of Darkness as well as their stylistic significances. The analysis will be from the lexis, syntax and text bases on Roger Fowler's and Leech & Short's theories on mind style. The concrete analysis of mind style will be divided into two parts: the characters'mind style and the authorial mind style. And at the end of this part the stylistic significances of mind style is presented.Chapter 2 explores the metaphor in Heart of Darkness and its stylistic significances. It is based on grammatical metaphor (GM), which is studied systematically under the systemic-functional framework: ideational GM, interpersonal GM and textual GM. This part illustrates the feasibility and appropriateness of adopting interpersonal GM to the study of fiction texts. It is a good way to promote the analysis to the fictional text.Chapter 3 analyzes the power relations embodied in Heart of Darkness and their stylistic significances through transitivity analysis.First is the demonstration of transitivity system. In this system the six processes will be introduced and some of them will be elaborated and be taken as a key issue to put emphasis on, such as the mental process, relational process and material process. My transitivity analysis of Heart of Darkness models on Halliday's analysis of The Inheritors and Liu Shisheng's analysis of Defoe's passage will be written from the following two cases.A. power relations between conflicting parties of human beingsB. objects dominate over human beingsAt the end of the chapter the stylistic significances of transitivity analysis will be presented.Part 3 is conclusion. In the conclusion the author reconsiders the whole research to give the general revaluation of the thesis to reinforce the stylistic effects in Heart of Darkness, and points out the room left for further research and modification in the stylistic analysis on the book. |
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