A Comparative Study Of Jane Eyre And The Children's Bach From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

The Children's Bach is a masterpiece novella by famous contemporary Australian female writer Helen Garner. Upon its publication, the novel received great acclaims, known as the"the fable of the modern love moral", and won the"South Australian Premier's Award"in 1986. Charlotte Bronte is one of the most well-known writers in Britain and even in the whole world, enjoying great reputation attributable to her masterpiece Jane Eyre. The heroine Jane is famous for her persistent pursuit for independence and equality, inspiring people generation after generation. Australia was once a colony of Britain. Although the two novels were written in different eras, both of them were written by women writers and reflected women's rights and status in the society and family, which make them comparable in literary tradition.Literary stylistics, an interdisciplinary subject established on the basis of linguistics and literary criticism, principally studies language features with stylistic significance and aesthetical value, for the sake of better understanding, interpretation and appreciation to literary works. Employing linguistic methods as tools, it describes and expounds literary texts, combining the form and content of literary texts. This study attempts to analyze and compare the language features of the Australian novel The Children's Bach and the British novel Jane Eyre from the perspective of literary stylistics.By adopting the method of"analyzing from layer by layer", this thesis compares the language expression styles of these two novels in three different categories of lexical selection, syntactical structure and textual tense respectively. In The Children's Bach, the most striking feature of its lexical selection proves to be the abundant application of colloquialism, slang and abbreviation; the sentences are expressed loosely and freely with prominent colloquial features; and ellipsis runs parallel with repetition. As for Jane Eyre, its affluent lexicons are reflected not only by the frequent use of loan words but by the flexible use of allusions from the Bible; the sentences are poetic while their patterns full of variety, long sentences and short ones interlacing and complementing each other. In terms of textual tense, both novels perfectly combine present and past tenses for the purpose of embodying the characters'mentality and shaping the protagonists'images, revealing the two female authors'solid literary foundation and outstanding writing capacity.Moreover, narrative point of view and rhetoric devices reflect the stylistic features and language manners of literary works to some extent. In the aspect of narrative mode, The Children's Bach largely adopts the third-person narration, combining character mode with omniscient mode, whereas Jane Eyre takes the first-person narration, and presents the development of the whole story via the narrative point of view of the protagonist"I". When it comes to figures of speech, both of the authors happen to coincide with the use of metaphor. The images such as"music"in The Children's Bach, and"dream"in Jane Eyre, etc, express feminist consciousness of the protagonists. Through the method of"tracing the full texts", this research analyzes the significance of metaphor images on depicting characters and displaying themes in the two novels. Furthermore, the thematic meaning produced by using the narrative point of view of different characters is also illustrated.By comparison of the two novels, it is not difficult to find that both of the women writers have their unique language style and narrative skills. On one hand, realism style and feminine awareness can be reflected in their literary works; on the other hand, there also exists many differences due to the following reasons: historical background, social culture, writers'personality as well as their experiences. Whatever The Children's Bach and Jane Eyre are, they truly embody women's consciousness and their pursuit for equality, freedom and love. The multi-dimensional analysis pattern provides us with a wide aesthetic space in the literary stylistic research. This research not only helps readers appreciate the works better, revealing their respective stylistic features and artistic charm; meanwhile, but also demonstrates the effectiveness of the application of stylistics in literary texts analysis.