Style And Theme

English Stylistics has always been attractive to the linguists in the world. In this thesis, the author will analyze five short stories of an American woman writer Joyce Carole Oates?with literature stylistic viewpoints and methods to discover how Oates gets different styles and expressed different themes in different language forms. The thesis contains six chapters: The first chapter is an introduction to stylistics and the works of Joyce Carol Oates. Since the author is going to analyze the relationship between the styles and themes of Oates?short stories, this chapter gives out the themes of the five short stories and the general character of Oates?works. The second chapter is an analysis about the relationship between narrators and themes. The author introduces the classification of narrators and then analyzes why Oates chooses different narrators in the five short stories to express different themes. The third chapter is about the speech and conversation in the five short stories. The author analyzes Direct, Indirect, Free Direct and Free Indirect Speech of the five short stories in details, and analyzes the conversation with Grice抯 Maxims of Language. The forth chapter analyzes the relationship among words, sentences and paragraphs through the methods of statistics. The author uses some forms and curves in this chapter to make the analysis more vivid and clear. The forth chapter talks about rhetoric, it will prove that Oates?works are always terse and plain. The last chapter is a conclusion of the whole thesis. The author hopes that the thesis can answer how and why Oates chooses different ways to express she herself in different stories, and help the readers of hers to understand her short stories better.