Story Theme in Literary Stylistics and Functional Stylistics

Abstract

Story Theme has been one of the major concepts in both literary criticism study and stylistic study. The essential characteristics of story theme might be summarized as being subjective and inter-subjective, social and generalized, pervasive throughout the whole text but covered, conventional and recoverable, and multi-faceted. This paper mainly discusses two stylistic approaches to story theme study. Literary stylistic approach focuses on the covert side and multi-levelness of story theme; while functional stylistics attaches much importance to the mechanisms that function to realize story theme.