Stylistic Features And Narrative Patterns Of English Fairy Tales

As a kind of children’s literature, fairy tales are loved by young children in a special way.During the reading process, youngsters could get educated by truth, kindness and beauty,which help to build their perseverance and confidence for future lives. A piece of good storycan inspire children’s minds, nurture their disposition, enrich their experiences, and moistentheir hearts. For adults, fairy tales are also the best nourishment for returning to one’s ego andeasing one’s psychological pressure. Why are we so fascinated by fairy tales? What linguisticfeatures does it possess? With these questions, this thesis tries to conduct an exploration aboutthe stylistic features and narrative patterns of English fairy tales.Since A Study of Fairy Tales by Laura F. Kready (1874-1928), the American womanwriter, was published in1916, researchers have made many studies on this literary genre,including studies on its language at the linguistic level. As an interdisciplinary discipline,stylistics has experienced a rapid development since the twentieth century. Various stylisticschools have emerged, and have acquired great achievements for study of many languagevarieties. However, few scholars or linguists have attempted theoretical analyses of the genreof fairy tales. So this paper is going to carry out a detailed analysis of the language featuresand narrative patterns of English fairy tales.Based on Michael H. Short, the great British linguist and stylistician’s three proceduresfor stylistic analysis, namely description, interpretation and evaluation, this thesis will attemptto analyze the linguistic features of fairy tales from the perspectives of phonology, lexis,syntax and rhetorical devices. This paper finds: at the phonological level, rhymes are oftenused to make the fairy language musical and poetic; at the lexical level, onomatopoeias appearfrequently in fairy tales; compared with abstract nouns and stative verbs, fairy tales employ concrete nouns and dynamic verbs more frequently; as a whole, the difficulty level forvocabulary in fairy tales is low; at the syntactic level, compound sentences and loosesentences dominate fairy tales, which simplify their logic relationship; most fairy tales adoptthe simple past tense and active voice; at the level of rhetorical devices, personification,simile, hyperbole and repetition are widely used.William Labov, the American sociologist, pointed out that a complete narrative structureshould include six elements: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolutionand coda. In this thesis, five best known English fairy tales are picked to be analyzed with thisnarrative model. Through data analysis, it is found that most fairy tales contain threenecessary elements—“orientation”,“complicating action” and “resolution”, but “evaluation”and “coda” are optional, and few fairy tales begin with the “abstract”.This thesis has not only analyzed the stylistic features and narrative patterns of Englishfairy tales, but also has extended the scope of stylistic studies. In the future, more attentionwould be paid to children’s literature. And furthermore, studies made in this thesis may havesome implications for teachings in primary education.