A Stylistic Analysis of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets

Abstract

The thesis aims at investigating the most salient linguistic features of Donne's poetic style and techniques as embodied in his Songs and Sonnets. It comprises fives chapters accompanied by a conclusion. The first two chapters present the literary background of the poet as well as the linguistic background of the concept of "foregrounding" while the last three chapters expose the linguistic analysis of poems.

This stylistic analysis is based on three levels: syntactic,

'semantic and lexical' and 'phonological and typographical' which are dealt with in three separate chapters respectively. Then, the components of Leech's model of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation along with frequency are applied on a large scale to the poetic texts under study. Besides, the linguistic theories which prove very important for highlighting the prominent characteristics of Donne's language are briefly explained and practically used .

Therefore the study attempts to reveal the versatile and original quality of Donne's poetry and prove his genius and individuality as a pioneer English poet. Hence , it shows how linguistics plays an essential and unique role in evaluating the literary work though examining and analyzing its most dominant linguistic features, i.e. relating the aesthetic critical interpretation with the linguistic description.