Re-Reading Tennyson's Three Poems-A Functional Stylistic Perspective

Alfred Tennyson was often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian Age in poetry. Tennyson's poetry not only reflects his own meditation on and interpretation of the social phenomena as well as progress, but also discloses the fact of people's worry, fear and suspense toward new beliefs in his age. This thesis aims to re-read three poems by Tennyson from the perspective of functional stylistics.Functional stylistics is an applied science further developed from Systemic Functional Linguistics, in which semantic level (Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual functions) is the realization of social semiotic level (Field, Tenor and Mode) and in turn, lexicogrammatical level (Transitivity, Mood and Theme-Rheme systems) is the realization of the semantic level.Halliday argues that language performs three metafunctions: the ideational function expresses the speaker's experience in the actual and the inner world and is composed of experiential and logical functions; the former includes processes, participants, and circumstances; the latter consists of such relations as coordination, subordination, conjunction, etc.; Interpersonal function means people use language to communicate with other people, to set up and maintain social relations, to express our attitudes or emotions, to influence their attitudes or behavior, and so on; the textual function organizes the previous two functions, ideational function and interpersonal function, enabling the addresser to construct texts suitable to the situation on the one hand, and on the other, enabling the addressee to distinguish coherent texts from disorganized sentence groups.Based upon the introduction of Halliday's functional stylistics theory, mainly three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function, three poems by Alfred Tennyson have been chosen for analysis. Besides the analysis of the three poems on the clause rank, context of situation, context of culture and motivated prominence which are peculiar to functional stylistic theories have been introduced for a deeper exploration of the three poems. During the process of functional stylistic analysis, the distinctive features of the three poems have been discovered. By doing so, we may achieve two objectives in the thesis at the same time: to provide a way of literary stylistic analysis in terms of all the three metafunctions in Halliday's Functional Stylistics to interpret the relationships between the theme and stylistic features of poetry; to enable readers from a brand-new perspective to better understand the motif of the three poems and appreciate the charm of Tennyson's poetry. Through the analysis and interpretation of the three poems, it is proved that functional stylistics is a very operational and practical stylistic theory of analysis, presenting an objective standard for stylistic analysis of poetry, and effectively making the reader's subjective comprehension based on the objective standard.