A Literary Stylistic Study Of Paper Pills，Mother And Death In Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio is the masterpiece of the famous American writer SherwoodAnderson. The whole book is consists of22independent stories. It tells the storieshappened in a town named Winesburg when American was experiencing thetransformation from an agricultural society to an industrial one. The people in the towncan not adjust themselves to the changing society, thus they close their minds and hearts.Gradually they become the grotesques in other people’s view. Actually they are a group ofkind people with wonderful dreams. Having no idea how to communicate with others,they gradually loose the opportunity to enjoy the society. Each story is independent on itown; at the same time they inter related each other. This kind of writing style has apioneering position in American literature. It has influenced many later writers, such asFaulkner’s Yoknapatawpha series of novels and Hemingway’s Nick Adam series. At thesame time, the language of Winesburg, Ohio has outstanding features. Under its simpleand plain language, there hide deep themes. This thesis analyses three representativestories in Winesburg, Ohio: Paper Pills, Mother and Death from the aspects of lexical,sentential features and cohesion.Firstly, by the lexical level, this thesis analyzes the languages depicting the maincharacters, then the general lexical features of the three stories. At the lexical level,Anderson shows the readers a group of kind people who are seemingly weird by using thesimple and common words. Secondly, from analyzing the sentence types and sentencecomplexity, this thesis reaches that in Mother and Death, Anderson shows the inner heartsof the characters by using some interrogative sentences, exclamatory sentence, andconditional sentences. At the level of sentence complexity, Anderson mostly uses thesimple and short sentences which indicate deep meanings. Lastly the most outstandingfeature at the level of cohesion is the lexical cohesion. By using repetition at lexicalcohesion, Anderson successfully makes his story a whole. Besides, anderson also uses thecohesion devices as reference and conjunction etc.This thesis shows that it is possible to use the theories of stylistics to analyzeWinesburg, Ohio. Anderson’s language has distinguished features. Besides thetraditionally methods of literary criticism, the stylistic methods are efficient too. Byanalyzing the language features, the readers can find the deep meaning and theme, thusbetter understand this literature work. This all deserve the scholar’s attention and further researching.