A Stylistic Analysis Of Alice Munro’s Short Stories Run Away

Alice Munro is a famous contemporary Canadian female writer who is well known for her short stories. Her works are deeply rooted in daily life and full of distinctive color and strong flavor of common life. Run Away was written by Alice Munro in 2004. As her representative work, this book helps Munro to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.Looked from home and abroad, the studies conducted on Run Away are mainly focused on the aspects of narrative structure, feminism, theme, etc. There are few papers related to the stylistic features of this book.In order to make up for this limitation, this study tries to conduct analysis on Run Away from the perspective of stylistics. The purpose of this study is to find out the typical stylistic features of Run Away and to summarize the writing style of Alice Munro. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is the analysis model proposed by Leech and Short in their Style in Fiction: a Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose(1981). Guided by this analysis model, the analysis on Run Away is conducted from four categories, namely, lexical,grammatical, figure of speech as well as context and cohesion.For the achievement of this purpose, both the qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in the process of the research. The qualitative method used in this study is mainly close reading. The quantitative method is the creation of a small corpus and the data analysis based on it. Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, four research questions are discussed in this thesis: What are the stylistic features of Run Away in lexical category? What are the stylistic features of Run Away in grammatical category? What are the stylistic features of Run Away in figure of speech? What are the stylistic features of Run Away in the category of context and cohesion?After the analysis of the stylistic features of Run Away from four categories, this thesis finds that the style of Run Away is simple, natural, vivid, colloquial, and flexible. It is reflected in four categories: The words are short and simple and full of feature of daily life.Short sentences compose the major part of the text. Short sentences and long sentences are combined together, flowing from one to another naturally and fluently. Meanwhile, the frequent use of interrogative sentences strengthens the colloquial style of the stories. The useof repetition, simile and personification produces vivid stylistic features of the stories and aesthetic effects of the daily life. The free change of the point of view and the presentation of speech exactly meet the need of narration, increasing the sense of situation.The natural coherence between sentences and paragraphs makes the narration vivid and smooth.The research findings above enlarged the research scope of stylistic theory. The analysis made the stylistic features of Run Away clear and explicit. Besides, this thesis summarized the writing style of Alice Munro, helping readers to read and understand her novels in a better way.