Corpus-Stylistic Study On The Rural Characteristics Of Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy is a great British,and he was known as “Shakespeare in England ”.Rural characteristics are the most prominent features of his works.He created a fictional kingdom called ‘Wessex’ in his works.Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of the most famous works in his Wessex series novels,which has attracted worldwide attention since its publication.In recent years,with the development of corpus technology,the application of corpus technology to the traditional literary criticism has become increasingly popular and generated a new discipline——corpus stylistics.In virtue of the technology of corpus,corpus stylistics makes quantitative and qualitative analysis on the stylistic features of literary texts with empirical research methods,and hence the research results will be more scientific and objective.This study made use of AntConc retrieval software to study the rural characteristics in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles from the following aspects: regional characteristics,folk custom and culture,the usage of dialect and some typical words with rural features,and then analyzed the causes of rural characteristics in Hardy’s novels from Hardy’s life experiences and the social background and literary ideological trend in the Victorian era.Then the author analyzed the poetic linguistics mechanism of the rural characteristics in Hardy’s novels In the field of poetic linguistics,Jacobson believed that ‘literariness’ refers to the characteristics which distinguish a literary text from non-literary text,and writers made ordinary language to be literary language by ‘violation’.In addition,the two basic patterns influencing the formation of language are ‘selection’ and ‘combination’.However,there are many factors influencing writers’ selective ways in the process of selection and combination.Hardy was born and grew up in the countryside,and he had a keen interest in the local customs and folk culture of his hometown since he was a child.When he came to London,he witnessed the impact of the industrial revolution to traditional rural life,he developed a strong sense of nostalgia.In addition,the social background at that time also provided a good condition for Hardy’s literary creation since under the industrial revolution,and the rapid development of public transportation and printing industry provided urban people more approaches to know the countryside,and the decline of other forms of entertainment made reading novels become the most popular way of amusement.In short,many factors contribute to the prominent rural characteristics of Hardy’s works.