LANGUAGE AND STYLE IN CRANE’S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE AND DICKENS’S MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

Abstract

This dissertation applies methods from linguistics, stylistics, literary criticism, and corpus studies to determine what aesthetic aspects of language and style are part of Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. In particular, the focus is on the linguistic and the stylistic deviations and foregrounding from the standard norms of the time, which make both works complex and ironic, unlike the straightforward language and styles used by their contemporaries to depict the everyday life in the nineteenth century. By employing linguistic and literary stylistics, the study is exposed to different and varied angles of analysis at different levels of language study, including phonological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic levels. Corpus stylistics comes to validate the analyses in linguistic and literary stylistics and gives the qualitative analysis a quantitative side. Results show that the language and the styles employed in The Red Badge and Martin Chuzzlewit are loaded with rich variety of stylistic devices like eye dialect, literary dialects, metaphor, irony, and so on. The works show also mixed stylistic trends coexisting in the melting pot of Realism like Romanticism, Impressionism, and Naturalism.