An Exploration Of Emily Dickinson's Contradictory View Of Nature By Analyzing Her Nature-themed Poems From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory evolves from Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Grammar. It comprises three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Each of them can be further divided into corresponding sub-systems. The theory attaches great importance to discourse semantics, aiming at exploring interpersonal meaning of written or oral text. In other words, it is suitable for evaluating the attitudes of the author conveyed in a discourse. Technically speaking, the theory is mainly realized by lexical choices. In other words, the author's attitudes are mainly revealed by his or her lexical resources which can be investigated from the three dimensions:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.The contradictory view of nature reflected in Emily Dickinson's nature-themed poems is a heatedly discussed question among the literary experts at home and abroad. Influenced by Emerson's transcendentalism, Dickinson expresses a certain positive view of nature in her nature-themed poems. Nevertheless, the author did not completely follow Emerson's transcendentalist view of nature, but deviated from it. This is resulted from the social environment and her special life experience at that time, especially her seclusion for almost 15 years. Therefore, nature in the author's eyes, is sometimes beautiful and harmonious, while some other time alien, violent, horrible, elusive and inharmonious.This thesis attempts to explore 3 research questions:(1) Are the results made by systematically analyzing Emily Dickinson's 10 nature-themed poems from the perspective of Appraisal Theory consistent with Emily Dickinson's contradictory view of nature concluded in literary world? (2) What is the general feature of Emily Dickinson's view of nature by systematically analyzing her 10 nature-themed poems from the perspective of Appraisal Theory? (3) What are the specific features of Emily Dickinson's attitudes towards nature in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation? Ten poems were chosen from Emily Dickinson's more than 500 nature-themed poems. Each poem was confined to a certain context according to the interpretation of the related famous experts. Furthermore, each poem was analyzed from the perspective of Appraisal Theory in different respects:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Among them, Attitude mainly reveals the poetess's evaluation of the nature, in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Engagement and Graduation accordingly modify the poetess's attitudes towards nature. In this thesis the three sub-systems and their respective sub-systems were employed to explore Emily Dickinson's contradictory view of nature systematically.Then the relevant statistical work was carried out to analyze the data got from each poem. The percentages of the positive and negative attitudes of the poetess for each poem were calculated, and the positive and negative orientations for each poem in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation were also counted. Next the percentages of the positive and negative attitudes of the poetess for the 10 poems were calculated, and the number and the percentages of positive and negative orientations for the 10 poems in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation were also calculated. Finally, the following tentative conclusions were arrived at:(1) The results made by systematically analyzing Emily Dickinson's 10 nature-themed poems from the perspective of Appraisal Theory are consistent with Emily Dickinson's contradictory view of nature concluded by literary experts. (2) Emily Dickinson's contradictory view of nature revealed by systematically analyzing her 10 nature-themed poems from the perspective of Appraisal Theory is generally characterized by being predominantly positive with positive attitudes outweighing negative ones. (3) In the 10 poems, with respect to Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, Emily Dickinson's contradictory view of nature is further complicated with the negative attitudes outweighing positive ones, positive attitudes outweighing negative ones, and positive attitudes outweighing negative ones respectively.