A Study Of Foregrounding In Cold Mountain From The Stylistic Perspective

Despite its up-to-now uncertainty of a secure prominent position in American literature, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain has earned fast success and critical popularity by its unique romantic love story and the thematic concern about human. The present author deems that the masterly use of language and the typical linguistic features in Cold Mountain are also the important embodiments of its literary value, so they deserve a great deal of time and energy for tasting and studying them.The foregrounding theory is one of the important literary theories in the west. Based on the foregrounding theory and taking an integrative mode with author, text and reader as components, this thesis is a tentatively effort to understand and appreciate Cold Mountain by describing the foregrounding features at linguistic and non-linguistic level, interpreting them and evaluating their special stylistic values, by which linguistic knowledge is integrated into the appreciation of literary work. In so doing, it is hopefully to help readers get a better comprehension and appreciation of this novel, and to serve the acceptance and popularity of Cold Mountain in China.As this study indicates, artistic ingenuity in Cold Mountain is extensively and effectively carried out, and it lies in many aspects, involving the deviation at phonological, graphological, lexical, grammatical, semantic level and the deviation of the narrative point of view, of schema and of structure, and also touching upon the over-regularity at phonological and syntactical level. Those foregrounding features well-knitted at both linguistic and non-linguistic level are novel, vivid, economical and expressive. Invested with rich implications, they are conductive to developing the thematic significance and aesthetic effects of Cold Mountain. By these abundant foregrounding features, we more aware the success of Cold Mountain is admittedly connected with the author's superb writing style and elaborate linguistic choices. And it is in grappling with the foregrounding that much of the pleasure of reading Cold Mountain lies. Meanwhile, it can be further concluded that the foregrounding theory is an effective interpretative instrument in literary stylistic analysis, and applying it to the interpretation and appreciation of a literary can enable us to have a more profound understanding and sense.