A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of The Moon Over The River On A Spring Night

Cognitive stylistics is an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological paradigm. It offers a new perspective for analysing and interpreting literary works. Figure and Ground Theory, FGT for short in the thesis, is one of the most influential theories in cognitive stylistics. Its foundations lie mainly in psychology, cognitive linguistics and literary theory as cognitive stylistics does. The thesis first offers a FG framework for literary text analysis, which incorporates important notions from FGT, i.e. identification of FG, interrelation of FG and interpretation of FG. The thesis also supplies a flowchart to illustrate their interrelationships, which is the present author's original contribution. Then it takes one of Chinese classical poems, The Moon over the River on a Spring Night by Zhang Ruoxu in the Tang Dynasty as a case study to apply theory to practice. The poem was praised as "the best poem and the artistic peak of all time" by Wen Yiduo, and it has not been explored from the perspective of FGT yet, so the study is significant. Previous scholars have mainly applied the theory to the analysis of English texts or English and Chinese sentences; no one has employed it to analyse a Chinese text yet. Therefore, the thesis is a tentative analysis in this respect but broadens the research field of FGT and cognitive stylistics. This thesis also originates a FG model that is the newness of the thesis, enlightened by the three dimensions and dynamic process of FG, the cognitive stylistic analysis of the poem and important notions from image schema. The thesis provides insights into FGT with an aim to supplement the theory and make it theoretically and practically more explanatory. It also intends to invite more scholars, especially Chinese scholars, to pay attention to the study of Chinese classics and apply findings to theoretical research and teaching.