Language features of the biography

Try the literature selection service. You can always turn off the advertisement. Safonova Language features of the individual style of Litton Streichi The article is devoted to the main stylistic features of the biographical prose of Litton Streich. The work explains what is the originality of the individual style of the biographical works of Strei. The basic provisions of the article are illustrated by examples from Queen Victoria’s biography “Queen Victoria”, keywords: biography, individual style, paths and figures of speech, expressive syntax, connotative vocabulary.

Litton Streichi is rightfully considered one of the main masters of the biography genre in English literature. He managed to increase the status of biographical prose and turn over the idea of ​​his compatriots about the biography, showing an example of a critical-irony attitude to the person’s personality. Victorian biographical prose was characterized by a general didactic orientation, the open glorification of the described person, the intentional prolapse of episodes and motives of a compromising character1.

These trends were reflected in the works of T. Carlyle, E. Gaskell, J. Forster, T. Hogg and other writers of the reign of Queen Victoria. Strachi acted as the creator of the new biography: he turned out to be the first writer who dared to openly ironize the Victorian ideals and freely handle historical material. Streichi declared himself in the year, publishing biographies of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr.

Arnold and General Gordon2. On the one hand, in the “famous Victorians” he parodies the views of these people, on the other hand, he makes it possible to feel their extraordinary and significance, emphasizing that their contribution to the history of Victorian England is difficult to overestimate. Nevertheless, in our opinion, Streichi managed to find his own, recognizable voice in the world of biography.

In the image of a man, the writer is more interested in his inner world than external events. Not striving for documentary accuracy, psychological depths and brightness in Strechi’s narration achieves with the help of a complex system of lexical and syntactic expressive means, various paths and figures of speech. The need to update the genre required an original approach to the use of stylistic techniques in biographical prose.

The style of Streichi is characterized by a variety of lexical features: the use of lexical units with unusual emotional and expression connotations, the use of detailed metaphors, biblical allusions. Strechi reaches great expressiveness at the level of syntax of phrases and sentences using means such as parental, inserting constructions, exclamations and rhetorical issues, anaphora, gradation.

At the same time, a certain type of path is often used by the writer in pairs with other expressive means, for example, anaphora and inversion are systematically used together. As an illustrative material, we would like to dwell in detail on the biography dedicated to the Queen of Victoria - “Queen Victoria”. According to Virginia Wulf, this biography strictly follows the facts of the Queen’s life: “Each statement is verified, each fact is verified with reality.

And in the end, he created a biography that may do the same for the queen that Boswell made a vocabulary for the compiler of the dictionary - M. We compare two passages on the same topic from the Queen of Victoria Strechi and the queen's biography, written by Christofor Gibbert. Lexically and syntactically, the words of the author himself are completely neutral.

Expressiveness is achieved exclusively due to direct quotes from Victoria’s letters “Great Power of Fascination”, “Someting Fascinating, Melancholy and Engaging”.

The choice of such a manner of presenting the material to K. Gibbert is generally justified, since the texts of Victoria herself abound with connotative units and the stylistic expressiveness of the author’s comment would create an imbalance. Here's how the meeting of the monarchs of Streichi describes: “She found that she was charmed by his first Manners, His Low, Soft Voice, and by the Soothing Simplimity of his Conversation.

He SUCCEEDEDED. There Was Someting Deep Whathin Her Which Responded Immedely and Vehemently to Natures that Offereda Conturast with Her Own. Her Adoration of Lord Melbourne Was Intimatewoven with Her Half-Conscious Appreciation of the Excitation Unlikens Between Herself and that Sophisticated, Subnel, Subten, Subtle Aristocratic Old Man. Very Different Was the Quality of Her Unlikence to Napoleon; Buts Quantity Was at Least as Great.

From Behind The Vast Solidity of Her Respectability, Her Conventionality, Her Established Happiness, She Peeered Outh A Strange Delicious Pleasure At tofamilir, Darkly-Glittering Foreign Object, Moving So Meteori-Cally Before Her, AMBIGUUUS CREATUREATULFULNESS AND DESSTINY ”6.The author does not just relies on the review of Victoria herself about the emperor of France, but compares her impressions of communicating with him with her relationship with Lord Melbourne, and makes a generalization about the Queen’s character, adding a nuance to the psychological portrait of her personality.

Without resorting to quotes from Victoria’s letters, Streichi himself comments on this event using the bright connotative phrases “The Soothing Simplicity of His Conversation” along with the rows of enhancing each other synonyms “From Behind the Vast Solidity of Her Respectability, Her Conventionality, Her Established Happiness, That Sophisticated, Subtle, Aristocratic Old Man.

The author, looking at the Emperor through the eyes of Queen Victoria, gives him almost supernatural forces “That unfamiliar, Darkly-Glittering Foreign Object, Moving So Meteorically Before Her, An Ambigous Creature of WillFulness and Destiny. " Turning with the traditions of Victorian biography, Strei-Chi strives for the ambiguous, ironic image of a historical person.

In his interpretation, Queen Victoria was sometimes stubborn to tyranny and did not differ in the flexibility of thinking. She read little and very superficially versed in state affairs. Victoria was inclined to judge political figures not by their ability to adhere to one line in politics, but based on their subjective impressions of them. The queen easily fell under the influence of the Prime Minister, if the person who held this post was charming enough to like her in personal communication, such as Lord Melbourne or B., on the other hand, Strechi emphasizes the strengths of Victoria’s personality-her hard work, devotion to her husband, moral purity, and the strength of the character “The Irresistible Potency of Her personality ".

Strechi gives vivid characteristics to the politicians surrounding Victoria: “A mere simulacrum of his former self” italics mine. A large number of abstract nouns in the biography complicates the narrative, creating an additional metaphorical plan “Nebulous Region of the Spirit”, “ATURE PERPLEXED and FULL of DANGERS” is allocated by the author - M. depicting the people surrounding the queen, Strechi often resorted to expanded metaphors.

According to A. Ondel7, it is the metaphor that is the main artistic technique in the work of Streichi, with its preference for the interpretation of the facts of collecting information and building them in chronological sequence. Thus, the author likes the eldest son of Victoria and Albert to a branch that they unsuccessfully tried to force to grow in the right direction: “But these Evidences of Innate Characteristics Only Served to reducel the efforts of hiss parents; It Still Might Not to Late to Incline the Young Branch, By Ceaseless Pressure and Careful Fastenings, To Grow in the Proper Direction.

" Baron Christian Friedrich von Shtokmar, a person who held the position of a doctor with a royal family, had a very great influence on the formation of Albert's personality: “The Prince Was His Creation. An Indexable Toiler, Presiding, for the Highest Ends, Over a Great Nation - that was her acchievement; and he look upon his work and it was good. " Strechi describes the royal doctor as the “creator” of Albert, resorting to the biblical quote “And God Saw That It Was Good”, “Authorized Version”, Genesis, Ch.

The relationship between Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, was significant in a significant complexity. The duchess longed for the authorities, and as soon as Victoria took the throne, she with longing for the fact that she should leave the stage as a magnificent ship that reached an uninhabited island after a long journey: “Sailing, so Gallantly and so personaChous, Through the Buffeting Storms of Life, The State Vessel, With Sails Still Swelling and Pennons Flying, Had Put Into Herbour At Last; To find the note - a Land of Bleak Deslation ".

The key figure in Victoria’s life, of course, was her husband. Describing their relationship, Strechi again actively resorts to the use of complex metaphors. Despite mutual love, they understood each other little: “Victoria idolized him; but it was understanding that he craved for, not idolatry; And How Much Did Victoria, Filled to the Brim Thing She Was with Him, Understand Him?

How Much Does The Bucket Understand The Well? He Was Lonely. He Went to HIS Organ and IMPROVISED with LEARNED MODULATIONS UNTIL THE SOUNDS, SWELLING and Subsiding Through Elaborate Cadences, Drought Soome Solace to His Heart. " The metaphor of the bowl and the source refers us to the biblical images of the well and the water vessel.Among the stylistic techniques used by the writer, it should be noted the so-called synonymous codenation use in a row of non-inimic words, which have a predominantly expressive function and differing from homogeneous words of the incompleteness of the semantic properties of the components due to special contextual conditions of their use, which is why their semantic likening is observed: “What,“ What, What, “What, What, What,” What, “What, What,“ What, ”What,“ What, ”What, ABOVE All, Struck EVERYBODY with Overwhelming Force Was the Contrast Between Queen Victoria and Her UNCLES.

The Nasty Old Men, Debauched and Selfish, Pig -Headed and Ridiculous, With Their Perpetual Burden of Debts, Confusions and DisrePutabilites - They Had Vanished Like the Snows of Winter, and Here at Last, Crowned and Radiant, Was the Spring. " Often, with a homogeneous list of Streich, it gives sentences to expressiveness using gradation, consistently using words with higher expressive potential of menopause: “But All Other Emotions Gave Before Her Overmastering Determination to Continue, Absolutly UnchaNGEN And for the Rest of her life on earth, her reveration, Her Obedience, Her Idolatry.

" Strechi actively uses introductory words and inserting constructions of a clarifying and complementary nature, giving some kind of intermittence, discreteness of sentence syntax: “Clearly, this, though perhaps annavoidable, was an undesirable state; NOR WERE THE OBJECTIONS to it Merely Theoretical; IT HAD in Fact Produed Unpleasant Consequences of a Serious Kind. " Parents and involved turnover of Streichi often significantly move away from the predicate: “At Last, After SO Long, Happiness - Fragmentary, Perhaps, and Charte with Gravity, But True and Unmistakable None?

Returned to her. " The syntax of the text is additionally complicated by the subordinate assets with the preposition “as”: “As the Law Stood, These Assaults, Futile As the Weres, Cold Only Treated as High Treason”. Conditional subordinate sentences with an inverse verb form “HAD” are often found: “Paradoxically Enure, Victoria Receved the Highest Eulogies for Assenting to a Political Evolution, Had She Completly Realized Its Import, WooLD HAVE FILLED Her with Supreme Pleasure.

" For Streich's prose, the use of inversion along with the repetitions and statements of a gnomic, generalizing nature: “The Ordinary Schemer is always an optimist; And Stockmar, Racked by Dyspepsia and Haunted by Gloomy Forebodings, Was a Constitutionally Melancholy Man. A Schemer, No Doubt, He Was; BUT He Schemed Distrustfully, Splenetically, To Do Good. To do good! What NoBler End Cold a Man Scheme for?

Yet it is perilous to Scheme at all. " Emotional tension is often created using exclamations and rhetorical questions: “What Had She to do with Empty Shows and Vain Enjoyments? She Was Absorbed by Very Different Preoccupations. She was the devote guardian of a sacred trist "; “But Alas! In this our Life What are the certainties? As follows from the previous examples, the Streich style is highly syntactic and the use of a significant number of connotative lexical units in original combinations.

Such the use of marked vocabulary and expressive syntax contributes to the expression of the irony of Strechi to the depicted personality, leaving space to evaluate the strengths of the character of the described person. The merit of Strachi, as a innovator in the field of biography, is that he overcame the restrictions of the Victorian biography, indicating the ways of updating the biographical genre.

Notes I Kabanova I. Problem of genre typology in English prose. Potnitseva T. Dnepropetrovsk: DSU, Hamilton I. A Brief History. Woolf V. Selection of Critical Essays. Hibbert C. Queen Victoria. It is quoted by: Strachey L. Nadel I. BIOGRAPHY: FICTION, FACT and FORM. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.