A Corpus Stylistic Study Of Features Of Updike's Rabbit Series Novels

John Updike is a contemporary American novelist, playwright, poet and literary critic.Among his works,Rabbit Series has been regarded as one of his most representative work.Rabbit Series, including Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981),Rabbit at Rest (1990) and Rabbit Remembered (2000), depicts four decades changes in America. Therefore,Rabbit Series,as one of the significant literary works,reveals the realistic prospect of contemporary America.Corpus stylistics is a relatively new area of study and offers us a new way to look at the literary works. Many researchers take advantage of corpus linguistics to analyze the theme or the style of a literary work. This thesis will use the corpus linguistics method which combines quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the features of Updike's Rabbit Series novels and distinguish them from Updike's other novels.This thesis is based on the comparison and analysis of the keywords extracted from the two corpora: Updike's Rabbit Series novels corpus and the corpus of Updike's other novels.The results show that: a. the story's topics are more around family relations (father, mother,and children) and gender relations. Also the statistics verify that the proportion of male characters depicting is much more than the proportion of female characters'. There does exist an unequal proportion of descriptions between male and female characters, however,there is not much or significant description of mental and physical abuse of female characters; b. the setting of the story is an American town, which is closed to the life of American middle class in the mid-20th century; c. the author always uses the present tense in Rabbit Series novels to shorten the distance between the readers and the characters, and also to make the plot more realistic; d. the author excels to use some vague expressions and focuses on describing the mental and physical changes of characters. This corpus-based stylistic study explores and identifies some new stylistic features of Updike's Rabbit Series novels and it is hoped that this study would deepen readers' understanding of this type of novels and to promote further development of corpus stylistic study in the field of literature.