A Cognitive Stylistic Study Of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies is one of William Golding’s masterpieces.Focusing on the exploration of the dark side of human nature,the author’s unique narrative perspective deepens the novel’s thematic portrayal.This work’s unique language style and profound ideas have received wide attention from readers and critics worldwide.The deviation and overregularity of language,as well as the conceptual metaphor embedded behind the language,are the main features of this novel.By combing through research on Lord of the Flies by scholars at home and abroad during the past decades,it can be found that most studies have focused on the themes of the novel,or the interpretation of the novel with the help of literary criticism.Among them,there are numerous research results about religious archetypal criticism and feminist criticism.However,few scholars have conducted in-depth studies of the novel’s language to interpret the character traits and ideological core of Lord of the Flies as presented through text language.Cognitive stylistics,as one of today’s highly regarded frontier disciplines,provides a systematic and scientific way to study how an author’s interpretation of the world is embodied in text,and help readers fully understand the textual content as well as appreciate its aesthetic value in the process of reading.Therefore,based on the existing studies and guided by the theory of cognitive stylistics,this thesis analyzes and studies the text of Lord of the Flies by reading it carefully and extracting typical examples.This thesis first gives an overview of the current state of foreign and domestic research on the novel,then composes the theoretical basis of cognitive stylistics,followed by the introduction of two theoretical approaches,foregrounding theory and conceptual metaphor theory.In the body of the thesis,the author applies the theoretical approaches of cognitive stylistic to analyze examples of foregrounding features and conceptual metaphors present in the novel,aiming to explore their role in characterization and thematic portrayal of the novel.The findings of this study are as follows--Firstly,there exist numerous examples of foregrounding features and conceptual metaphors in Lord of the Flies.With the combination of the two,the theme of the novel is revealed through the language text.William Golding cleverly presents the images of different characters through foregrounding,which satirizes the darkness of human nature and promotes the development of plot.The application of conceptual metaphors shows diversified ways of thinking of William Golding as well as rich imagination,which mirrors the reflection of the real society in the novel through his existing knowledge and social experience.Different conceptual metaphors reflect the human society at that time from the natural society,revealing the broken society and the contradictions within human beings under the rule of violent power after the war.This unique writing style endows the text language with charm.Through the surface and deep cognitive interaction,the novel achieves a successful combination of language and content,which also brings readers a wonderful reading experience.