The English Of Fairy Tales

Fairy tale,as a major component of children's literature,builds images and reflects human life through colorful imagination,vivid fantasy and exaggeration. There is hardly a childhood without fairy tales.Excellent fairy tales can not only be passed on from generation to generation within the nation,but also be spread beyond the boundary to any corner of the world.It is fairy tales that accompany children's growth and influence their life deeply.They make children know the good and evil in the world,and tell them how to behave themselves.Therefore,the study of fairy tales is of significance in terms of children's moral and affection education.Fairy tale becomes an independent variety with unique stylistic features due to its field,mode and tenor of discourse.Since the publication of Kready's A Study of Fairy Tales in 1916(Kready,1916),people have studied fairy tales from many angles.And there have been researches done on the language of fairy tales at the linguistic level.From the beginning of the 20^th century,as a relatively independent interdisciplinary subject(申丹,2000),stylistics has experienced a rapid development.Various new schools of stylistics are emerging,and stylistic analyses into different varieties have made great achievements.Nevertheless,fairy tales have not been paid its due attention to by linguists and stylisticians.The result is that seldom do researchers consider fairy tales and carry on theoretical researches on them in the system of stylistics.Joseph Jacobs,who was a prominent scholar and literary critic,is best remembered for his contribution to children's literature.This thesis analyzes TEN cases in his well-known collection English Fairy Tales(1993).First,this thesis employs Leech and Short's literary stylistic analysis framework,which is elaborated in Style in Fiction(Leech & Short,2006),to give an account of the salient features of fairy tales as an independent variety.In Leech and short's framework,they divided a literary work into three levels,namely,the level of message,the level of text,and the level of discourse.In this thesis,the author carries out the literary stylistic analysis of ten cases of fairy tales largely according to this framework.However,when dealing with the levels of message and text,this thesis also employs Halliday's functional stylistic theories of transitivity and cohesion to investigate the frequency distribution of processes and conjunctions in fairy tales.And when dealing with the discourse level,according to the complementary feature of narratology and stylistics in analyzing literature works,this thesis also makes use of narrative theories to study the point of view and modes of speech presentation in fairy tales.In one word,this thesis studies the salient features of the variety of fairy tales with literary stylistics as the main analytical tool,and functional stylistics and narrative analysis as the supplementary methods.This study not only generalizes and explains the features of the English of fairy tales,extends the study of literary stylistics by drawing the attention of linguists and stylisticians into children's literature,but also offers considerable implications in teaching fairy tales as a tool in English teaching and moral education in kindergartens and/or the early years of primary schools.