A Literary Stylistic Approach To Reconstruction Of Foregrounding

In literature, meaning is inseparable from form. Therefore, in literary translation, in addition to fully convey the meaning, translators still need to identify the characteristic expression ways of the ST and to reconstruct their unique artistic values in the TT. For the purpose of preserving both meaning and form in the TT, it’s essential for translators to clarify the relationship between them, to figure out how the original author manipulates linguistic forms to achieve the thematic meaning and artistic effect. Literary stylistics, a discipline mediating literary criticism and linguistics, focusing on how the linguistic choices contribute to the thematic and artistic significance, may shed some light on it. Foregrounding, one of the key concepts in literary stylistics, refers to the use of those prominent expressions that contribute to the thematic meaning and artistic effect. With those foregrounded features, translators can catch the characterized style of the ST and its unique meaning. Hence, it is of great significance to analyze the characteristic expressions from a literary stylistic approach with the focus of foregrounding, in order to reproduce the thematic meaning and artistic effect in the target language.Ye Cao, a masterpiece of Lu Hsun, is considered the best reference to know about him. It has received abundant attention from various scholars at home and abroad, owing to its unique linguistic expressions and plenty of interpretations on its themes, by which the importance of its translation is highlighted. However, there has been no research on its English translation so far. This is quite insufficient for the translation study of such a work imbedded with salient stylistic features.The present thesis, with an example of the English version of Ye Cao translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, tries to analyze foregrounding in it from the perspective of literary stylistics, with a goal of exploring how the translators reproduce the foregrounded features in the target language to reconstruct the thematic meaning and artistic value, and hoping that it will offer some insight on literary translation and its criticism.