Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Generic Structure And Stylistic Features

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known as the Grimm Brother, collected hundreds ofGerman fairy tales into a book named Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was first publishedin the year1812. As one of the most popular fairy tale books, Grimm’s Fairy Tales is acollection of love, hatred, death, immortality and fantastic imaginary. Thousands ofhundreds of studies and researches have been done from the perspectives of aesthetic oftragic element, translation, sociology, psychology, morality, and childlike narration,while few are from the viewpoint of linguistic features and generic structure.According to Labov Narrative Analysis, a fully developed narrative includes sixelements: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda. Bymeans of applying Labov Narrative Analysis, the author of this dissertation chose fiveof the most famous stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales as sample texts to analyze theparticular generic structure of the collection. And the result may be drawn: Grimm’sFairy Tales adhere to an “orientation--complicating action--resolution” genericstructure.By ways of description, interpretation and evaluation, all of which are the threesteps of Geoffrey Leech’s procedures of stylistic analysis, this thesis aims at apreliminary study of the linguistic features and their stylistic effects of Grimm’s FairyTales published by Wordsworth so as to help readers get a better understanding andappreciation of linguistic inventiveness of this great book. In the light of Leech’s theory,linguistic features at phonological, lexical and semantic levels are found. The frequentuse of archaisms, colloquial words and onomatopoeias helps achieve visual-audioeffects. The preference for rhetorical devices, such as simile, hyperbole and repetition,makes the stories novel, vivid and fascinating. Register-mixing, the analysis of which isan innovative research, makes the language comic, humorous and funny, and alsoenhances the dramatic effects of the language. All these writing devices contribute toarousing children’s interest and curiosity in the stories.Besides the findings of this dissertation, limitations are also listed. Phonologicalpatterns and inverted sentence patterns, both of which are distinctive features of thecollection, are not discussed in detail. For further studies, the two patterns mentioned before, as well as the narrative point of view can be explored. Irregularity and exceptionmay cause failure of the statistics made in Chapter Four, because only five out of twohundred tales are used to analyze the narrative mode.