Stylistic Analysis Of American Young Adult Novel The Outsiders

This research is mainly about the literary stylistic features of an American young adult novel The Outsiders.American young adult literature,as a unique literature genre,started from 1930s.In the past few years,there has been an explosion of well-crafted literature for secondary school students,especially at the high school level,with stories that focus on the journey from adolescence to adulthood.It was not until 50's and 60's of the 20^th century that children's literature became an independent discipline.The Outsiders is now a classic young adult novel, which was written by S.E.Hinton - a very successful story writer for young adults.The publishing of The Outsiders gave her a lot of publicity and fame,and also made her known as "The Voice of the Youth".The Outsiders is still widely read and one of the most important and taboo-breaking books in the field.It tells a story of two sets of high school rivals,the Greasers and the Socs(for society kids).They belong to two different social classes.The Greasers are very poor,are less cared by their parents,and are always jumped by the Socs.They have to fight for their survival.They are like the outsiders of the society.The Socs are the upper class of the society,but they are also the gangs of the street.The Outsiders marked the beginning of a new kind of realism in books written for American young adult market,and it has been accepted by young people as an authentic voice that continues to illuminate their experiences and emotions, giving insight into their lives.Therefore,this novel is worth studying.This research has applied the theory of literary stylistics.It tackled both the linguistic pattern and the literary criticism.Literary stylistics makes researches about the literary language the author used and the stylistic features in literary works.Using the literary stylistic approach to analyze one book or several books of any individual writer,readers can tell the author's style about his words,phrases,sentences and the plot arrangements.This research has analyzed The Outsiders's style of writing at several levels.In linguistic description,it analyzes the features at the Phonological/Graphological Level,the features at the Lexical Level and the features at the Syntactic/Grammatical Level.In textual analysis,it shows the features of cohesion and coherence of the text.In contextual factors analysis,it explains the features of field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.In the presentation of speech and thought,it demonstrates the features of direct speech and indirect speech,free indirect thought and direct thought.After the literary stylistic analysis of The Outsiders,the findings show that,this young adult novel has unique language style and narrative strategy,and it is as a mature literary work as the classics.