A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of O.Henry

This thesis concentrates on the analysis of O. Henry's three masterpieces, i.e. TheFurnished Room, The Cop and the Anthem, While the Auto Waits, from functionalstylistic perspective.According to the survey, the preceding functional stylistic analysis has beenrestricted to the study of one item of the lexico-grammatical layer, e.g. transitivitysystem, or the study of one piece of works from multi-perspectives. The originality ofthis thesis lies in the following two aspects. First, this thesis is to analyze differentworks of the same writer from multi-perspectives based on functional stylistics, andthen summarize his/her writing style. Besides, the target writer in this thesis is O.Henry, one of the greatest writers in the fictional world, who ranks with Chekhov andMaupassant. However, O. Henry's works do not get much attention. The surveyshows that only one M.A. thesis has dwelt upon his works, and there is none fromlinguistic perspective. Therefore, this thesis attempts to apply FS to the study of O.Henry's works. On the one hand, it provides a brand-new, objective angle for literaryappreciation, and on the other hand, it serves to check and enrich FS.This thesis mainly adopts qualitative analysis complemented by quantitativeanalysis. First, it will analyze the three variables of context of situation, providing anoverall understanding of the content and background of each story. Then it will makea detailed analysis into the three stories, i.e. The Furnished Room, The Cop and theAnthem, While the Auto Waits, from the following aspects: cohesion system,transitivity system, mood system, etc. Based on the analysis, this thesis willsummarize the general features of O. Henry's writings.The author has discovered that O. Henry is especially concerned about the "littlecitizens" of American society in the early twentieth century. His stories are allnarrated from the third-person perspective. Objective plane of narration andsubjective plane of narration exist simultaneously. The proportion depends on thecontent and the language may vary in formality with different characters. There is always a surprising ending in each story. Besides, O. Henry is good at manipulatingdifferent language resources available, especially vocabulary. He tends to employwords of the same semantic field to deliver his point. Further, O. Henry tends to usethe definite article "the", instead of the indefinite article "a" in the titles. By using thisdevice, O. Henry seems to put the readers inside, as one is assumed to have shared acommon prior knowledge of the matter of the story with the narrator. Lastly, differentaspects of FS are not equally distributed in the stories. Lexical cohesion featuresprominently in The Furnished Room, especially in the description of environment, butrelatively weak in While the Auto Waits.The main body of this thesis consists of six chapters. In the first chapter, theauthor points out the necessity of the present study, and clarifies the aims, significanceand organization of this thesis.Chapter two presents a general survey of functional stylistics both at home andabroad. Chapter three is an introduction to O. Henry's life, the social background andhis three pieces of works to be analyzedin this thesis.In chapter four, the author describes various dictionary meanings of style,elaborates three important notions about style and points out what style is in thisthesis. The author agrees with Halliday's understanding that style is "motivatedprominence". In this chapter, the author also makes a general introduction to ThreeMetafunctions, and finally proposes the methodology in this thesis.The fifth chapter investigates the Furnished Room, the Cop and the Anthem, and,While the Auto Waits one by one from cohesion system, transitivity system, moodsystem, etc. that realize the three metafunctions, relating them to contextual variables,and then reaches evaluation.Chapter six is the conclusion. In this chapter, the author summarizes O. Henry'swriting style, points out the limitations of this thesis and advances some suggestionsfor further studies.