A Literary Stylistic Study Of The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Stylistics is a discipline that studies style by using modern linguistic theories and methodology. It is literary stylistics that has a close tie with linguistic and literature teaching (including foreign language teaching). Strictly speaking, literary stylistics is kind of literary criticism which is established on the basis of linguistics; it is an approach to the study of literary texts through linguistic theories and methodology. Literary stylistics is an inter-discipline which serves as a bridge between linguistics and literary criticism. It enables us to better understand and appreciate the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of literary texts by describing and analyzing the language components the author chooses and their specific stylistic effects.Based on the literary stylistic theories, this thesis attempts to discuss the possibility and necessity of applying these theories to literary criticism. It attempts to analyze one of Edgar Allan Poe's masterpieces The Fall of the House of Usher from the following aspects:point of view, lexical level and rhetorical features.First of all, it's the analysis of the point of view in this fiction. Different from Poe's usual first-person narrating with I-protagonist, the first-person narrator of this fiction is only a witness, a participant. He witnesses the fall of the House and the disappear of the family, and that makes his narration believable. His description which brings the readers right into the scene successfully plays up the gloomy and horrible aura of the story.Then, the thesis analyzes the lexical features of the fiction. Poe employs many negative and depressing words to enhance the gloomy, dreary and horrible aura of the fiction; and meanwhile, he properly uses a large number of literary words to play up the grave and solemn atmosphere of this fiction. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the thesis figures that this fiction is of an adjectival style and analyzes the stylistic features of adjectives and nouns in it.Finally, rhetorical features of the fiction are analyzed. Allan Poe uses a wide range of figures of speech in this short story, such as metonymy, oxymoron, hyperbole, etc., among which, alliteration and symbolism are of distinctive stylistic features.