An Analysis Of Foregrounding In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn From The Stylistic Perspective

In most cases, literary critics or common readers tend to appreciate novels directly according to their experience or immediate impression, so we tend to feel that this kind of appreciation or criticism is too subjective and impressionistic. In this thesis, we will analyze the foregrounded features in this novel—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the stylistic perspective. Literary works and linguistic knowledge are combined together not only to help readers get a better comprehension and appreciation of this novel, but to make our research more objective and more scientific.Ernest Hemingway once said:"all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn". This great praise is given to Mark Twain's masterpiece–Huckleberry Finn. In this novel, the protagonist is a teenage boy living in the American antebellum South. The narrative is on"the road"when Huck, partly to escape the persecution of his drunken father and partly to evade the artificially imposed restrictions and demands of society, decides to accompany Jim, the slave of his benefactors, in his attempt to run for his freedom. The most immediate reason for Jim's deciding to run away is the fact that Miss Watson, his owner, has decided to sell him"down the river"—that is, into the Deep South, where instead of making a garden for nice old ladies or possibly being a house servant, he will surely become a field hand and work in the cane or cotton fields. These two, the teenage urchin and the middle-aged slave, defy society, the law, and convention in a daring escape on a raft down the dangerous Mississippi River. Finally, after some uneasy moments when Jim is captured, they learn that his owner has freed him, and Huck decides to head west—away from civilization.Exactly to say, this paper is based on the theory of foregrounding. Foregrounding can be classified into two types: qualitative foregrounding (deviation) and quantitative foregrounding (over-regularity). Qualitative foregrounding is the deviation from the language code itself (deviation from some rule or convention of English), and may appear at various linguistic levels, but in this thesis we've discussed five levels of the language in Huckleberry Finn, and then made a tentative evaluation about the foregrounded language, that's to say, what stylistic effects have been achieved. Quantitative foregrounding occurs in the form of repetition or parallelism. When a certain item in language appears in high frequency, it definitely stands out from the background and catches people's attention. Writers prefer to use alliteration and onomatopoeia at the phonological level, and repetition and parallelism at the syntactic level. These features are not deviant, but so striking that they form over-regularity. In this novel, we can find enough examples to prove this.In this paper, we have made an analysis of deviation in Huckleberry Finn not only at the linguistic level, but also at the non-linguistic level. We have discussed the deviation of the narrative point of view, the schema deviation and the structural deviation. Through these analyses at different levels, we find that readers could have a deeper and more over-through understanding towards novels. Meanwhile, this thesis provides an approach that helps readers appreciate literary works more objectively and more scientifically. Up to now, discussion at the non-linguistic level is still a relatively new field which has a broad space waiting for us to explore when we make literary criticism or appreciation.