Foregrounding: A Stylistic Study Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's masterpiece, is widely regarded as the summit of American nineteenth-century fiction and one of the greatest novels in any language. This thesis intends to analyze its stylistic characterization in a relatively comprehensive way through the theory of foregrounding.This thesis is composed of three parts: an Introduction, three Chapters, and a Conclusion."Introduction" gives a general survey of the critical literature of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and a comparatively sound discussion on the theory of foregrounding. Finally, this thesis tells how it is organized.Chapter One focuses on the foregrounding in presentational techniques. It consists of four aspects, with emphasis on dramatization, suspense, metafictionality, and parallelism. In "Dramatization," the thesis investigates how the novel gains the effects of foregrounding in the presentational technique of dramatization. In "suspense," this thesis discusses many kinds of suspense and its aesthetic effects. In "metafictionality," the thesis examines how it is metafictionalized noticeably in the ways of intertextuality and narrative intrusion. Lastly, it discusses the unique parallelism.Chapter Two interprets foregrounding in hybridity of genres of Moby-Dick. In it, the thesis scrutinizes the dialogic heteroglossia - the epic, symphony, encyclopedia, and philosophy.Chapter Three analyzes its characterization, and mainly discusses the symbiosis relationships between the characters, especially between Ahab and Moby-Dick, Ahab and Ishmael, and Ishmael and Queequeg, only to find out that they define themselves by each other.The Conclusion makes a summary of this thesis and restates its main points.