A Comparison Of The Styles Between Gulliver's Travels And Flowers In The Mirror

Guliiver 憇 Travels, written by Jonathan Swift, the famous eighteenth century English satirical writer, and Flowers in the Mirror, written in late Qing Dynasty by the Chinese satirical writer, Li Ru-zhen (Li Ju-chen), are written completely according to the respective national cultural traditions. Yet in spite of the distance between them in both time and space, the two authors of different nationalities happen to hold the same views and resemble each other amazingly in their choices of the theme, the literary genre, the structure of the fiction, and the artistic devices.Neither of the two authors lives in a time with the freedom of speech. Both of them are dissatisfied with the reality in their society and try to advocate some kind of revolution, but they cannot write their views down directly and have them published. Therefore, they have to take some kind of tactics: writing in the form of travel notes, by means of fantasy and exaggeration, the authors tell the stories of adventures in the exotic overseas countries. However, all the absurd incidents are reflections of the real world. The evil aspects of human nature, exaggerated by the gifted pen of the writers, become the bizarre and ridiculous fantasy in the readers?eyes.In both Gulliver 憇 Travels and Flowers in the Mirror, many aspects of life are covered, including politics, culture, education, morality and ethics. The writers criticize every kind of malpractices and express their longing for an ideal society and a better future.4Of course, in the arrangement of detailed plots, there are some differences between the two fictions. For instance, there are some differences between the two authors?viewpoints toward the problems existing in the overseas countries; the protagonists?professions and their aims of sailing are also different.Apart from their similarities in content and theme, the two fictions are also similar in form. Both of them express a solemn and sublime theme in a form of satire and humor. In their using of satire and humor, both of the authors follow the principle that 揳uthenticity is the life of satire? They unite the fantasy and the reality together. With the authenticity and credibility, the authors exaggerate the hideous phenomena in the human life and thus try to stimulate the readers into introspection and be moved to comprehension. Moreover, both of the writers employ a method of reversing the reality and contrasting it with the reality, and by means of this, express their own ideals.Guliiver 憇 Travels and Flowers in the Mirror resemble each other so much that it must be very interesting and very meaningful to compare them with each other and do some research. However, through the research work on the previous studies on the two writings, 1 find that most of them concentrate on their content, that is, the social phenomena that the writers satirize and the ideal society that the writers long for, and few of them are done on the linguistic features and literary devices, that is, the stylistic features of the two fictions. I believe that the stylistic features of a fiction can reflect the author抯 circumstances better. It can reflect the cultural tradition of the author, the author抯 attitude toward his writings, what does the author think of5his writing and what he wants his readers to think about and reflect on his writings. Therefore, in this thesis, I try to use the basic theories of stylistics and literature, focus on the detailed analysis of the stylistic features of Gulliver 憇 Travels and Flowers in the Mirror, analyze their strong points and shortcomings, expound the similarities and differences between the two fictions and investigate in the deep reasons for these similarities and differences by analyzing the differences in the cultural traditions and patterns of thought between China and the Western countries. I also try to investigate in the linguistic and literary devices the writers use to achieve their purposes.There are five parts in this thesis:...