Andersen's Fairy Tales: Stylistic Features And Generic Structure

H. C. Andersen produces almost 170 fairy tales in his nearly 40 years of fairy tales writing. Nowadays, they are quite popular among all the children and even adults throughout over 100 countries for about 200 years. Most of his fairy tales deal with issues of love, death, religion, immortality, and some of them are merely fantastic imagination. Although there is much criticism on Andersen and his fairy tales, as far as I know, not much criticism is made from stylistics and mode of genre. Therefore, to explore their linguistic features, the thesis is to make an attempt to the linguistic features, and the narrative mode of his fairy tales from stylistics and Labov's narrative model.The thesis follows basically the three steps of stylistic analysis raised by Leech: description, interpretation, and evaluation, from levels of phonics, lexis, syntax, semantics, and symbolism. Five fairy tales are used to exemplify the generic features of Andersen's fairy tales with Labov's theory of narrative structure.In the light of the above method, the thesis finds that the language in Andersen's fairy tales is of a colloquial style. At the lexical level, simple and concrete words, color words, and onomatopoeic words are well used in his fairy tales; at the syntactic level, loose sentences, compound sentences, exclamatory and interrogative sentences turn up frequently in narrative part;at the semantic level, rhetoric devices like repetitions, hyperboles, similes and metaphors are easily found, which makes the language vivid and lovely, and also helpful in expressing the motifs of the fairy tales; at the phonological level, it is easy to find rhythmic patterns in Andersen's fairy tales, which adds to the poetic flavor of the stories. After the generic analysis of five fairy tales with Labov's theory of narrative structure, the thesis finds that the element of Coda of Labov's theory, the author's conclusion of the stories'implied meaning, is in high frequency in Andersen's fairy tales, which is coincident with the nature of moralizing function of fairy tales,.