Irony In William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night -From The Perspective Of Speechact Theory

This thesis is intended to make a detailed analysis of the pragmatic feature of irony in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night within the framework of Speech Act Theory.It approaches irony in both literary and linguistic fields, elaborates the connections between irony and speech act theory, reviews previous literary criticism on Shakespeare's irony in Twelfth Night and finally makes a case study of the ironic feature in the drama from the perspective of speech act theory.With the development of the pragmatics, many of its core theories have found a successful application in literary criticism and therefore generated a new interdiscipline—Literary Pragmatics, in which the dominant theory is speech act theory and which has a wide range of application.As one of the greatest playwrights in the world, Shakespeare employed irony in his drama Twelfth Night supremely well. However, many scholars mainly focus their attention to the author or the content of irony in Twelfth Night. Since the author played so much time on his language, we have no reason to neglect his language technique in the study.This thesis aims at exploring Austin and Searle's speech act theory in the case study of irony in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It facilitates us to understand its ironic thoroughly and affirms the feasibility of applying pragmatics theories, speech act theory in particular, in literary studies.