A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Alice Munro’s Fits And The Progress Of Love

As one of the most famous Canadian female writers, Alice Munro is specializedin writing stories from female s point of view for the readers in realistic approach.Her plain narration always contains profound thematic meaning which touches thereaders and impresses the world. Fits and The Progress of Love are tworepresentatives from Munro s short story collection The Progress of Love, publishedin1986. Compared to her other early works, these two novels have differentnarrative perspective, deepened themes, and diversified artistic expression methods.Through the detailed description of female characters daily lives, these worksexpose their own problems from the females point of view, showing the inner worldof them, and how they constantly adjust themselves to grow mature in life and getthe progress of love eventually. This thesis aims to probe deep into Alice Munro stwo novels, analyzing them with the theory of functional stylistics. Through thecareful analysis of these short novels, this thesis would provide a new and objectiveperspective to study Munro s works for future learners.This thesis attempts to analyze Alice Munro s two short stories--Fits and TheProgress of Love with the method of functional stylistics. Through functional stylisticanalysis, the thematic significance and language features of Alice Munro s workswould be revealed. Meanwhile, combined with the cultural context and ideology, thispaper will get further understanding and interpretation of the significance of Munro snovels. In this thesis, the author mainly adopts descriptive and qualitative approachesto do the functional stylistic analysis, meanwhile makes detailed quantitative analysistowards certain typical sections in the two novels, utilizing a large number of corpusanalysis and data support to analyze the novels thematic significance, meanwhilesummarizeAlice Munro s writing features.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one introduces the motivation andresearch significance of this thesis, and indicates the overall organization of thethesis. Chapter two describes the development of stylistics and the systematic functional grammar, as well as Alice Munro and her works. Chapter three is aboutthe theoretical framework of functional stylistics and the methodology which isadopted by this thesis. The fourth chapter is the main section of this thesis, whichutilizes the three metafuntions of functional grammar to analyze the thematic featuresand writing style of Alice Munro s Fits and The Progress of Love. Combiningcultural context and ideology, chapter five will get some interpretation to the analysisof this thesis and attempt to summarize the significance of Alice Munro s writingstyle and the theme of her works. The sixth chapter is the conclusion part, pointingout both the innovations and the shortcomings of this thesis. With the limitationsfound here, chapter six will also give suggestion for future work.Through detailed textual analysis of her two novels, this thesis points out AliceMunro s humanistic care surpassing simple feminism reflected through her works, aswell as her profound concern for the lives of women. Meanwhile, as an objectiveanalyzing method, functional stylistic analysis has also been fully proved itspracticality and operability, which can be used as an objective and scientific methodto interpret literary works by readers.