"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum": Corpus Stylistics and Language of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53469/jsshl.2024.07(02).19Keywords:
The Handmaid's Tale, Corpus Stylistics, Margaret Atwood, Wordsmith ToolsAbstract
This paper investigates the stylistic and linguistic characteristics of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel of Canadian origin. Employing a corpus-based approach, the researcher aims to analyze its stylistic features in-depth, focusing on specific predetermined categories. Quantitative analysis was facilitated through WordSmith 8.0 software, enabling the identification of keywords in context, which serve as indicators of the linguistic style within the selected corpus. Results indicate that the novel employs simple language and concise sentence structures. Moreover, it demonstrates lexical diversity, encompassing various themes with a higher type-token ratio (TTR), indicative of a diverse vocabulary. Notably, there is a notable prevalence of first-person singular pronouns throughout the text. Regarding content word distribution, verbs are the most frequently utilized, followed by nouns, pronouns, adverbs, and adjectives—additionally, the analysis of keywords aids in uncovering stylistic and linguistic elements embedded within the text.
References
Adil Jaafar, E., & Abdul-Salam Jasim, H. (2022). A corpus-based stylistic analysis of online suicide notes retrieved from Reddit. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 9(1), 2047434.
Atwood, Margaret. "When Afghanistan Was at Peace." In Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose--1983-2005, pp. 207, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
Atwood, Margaret. "When Afghanistan Was at Peace." In Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose--1983-2005, pp. 207, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
Atwood, Margaret. "Margaret Atwood on What 'The Handmaid's Tale' Means in the Age of Trump." The New York Times, 8 May 2020, p. 7.
Atwood, Margaret. Survival. [edition unavailable]. House of Anansi Press Inc, 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2022.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1985. Retrieved from https://ia801807.us.archive.org/18/items/the-handmaids-tale_pdf/the-handmaids-tale_ForLibrary.pdf.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale, translated by Chen Xiaowei. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2020, p. 83.
Baddeley, A. D., Thomson, N., & Buchanan, M. (1975). Word length and short-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14(6), 575–589.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bloom H (1994) The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt.
Culpeper, J. (2009). Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech, and semantic categories in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet character-talk. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(1), 29–59.
Dam, Daný van, and Sara Polak. "Owning Gilead: Franchising Feminism through Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments." European Journal of English Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, May 2021, pp. 172–89.
Fischer-Starcke, B. (2010). Corpus linguistics in literary analysis: Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Continuum.
Fletcher, W. H. (2006). "Phrases in English" home. Retrieved from http://phrasesinenglish.org/index.html.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258, 1917.
Gámez Fuentes, María José, and Rebeca Maseda García. "Nostalgia and the Dialectics of Contemporary Feminisms in The Handmaid's Tale." Science Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2021, pp. 77–93.
Green, C. (2017). Introducing the Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature: A corpus for culturomics and stylistics. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 26(4), 282–299.
Halliday, M.A.K (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. (2nd edition). London: Edward Arnold.
Jadwin, Lisa. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985): Cultural and Historical Context. Blackwell Publishing, 2009.
Leech, G., & Short, M. (2007). Style in Fiction. Pearson Education Limited.
McIntyre, D., & Walker, B. (2019). Corpus stylistics: Theory and practices. Edinburgh University Press.
McNees, E. (2003). 'Tell': Narrative Technique in "The Handmaid's Tale." In S. Stein & C. Robin (Eds.), Approaches to Teaching Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Other Works (pp. 119-124). The Modern Language Association of America.
Revelles-Benavente, Beatriz. "Intra-Mat-Extuality: Feminist Resilience within Contemporary Literature." European Journal of English Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, May 2021, pp. 190–206.
Sanyal, J. (2006). English: The book for every englishspeaking Indian. Viva Books Ltd.
Savona, G. (2016). 'Historical Notes on The Handmaid's Tale: The 'The' and the Word 'of' as Ambiguous Possessive Markers'. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 14(1), 15-39.
Schneider, Ana-Karina. "Clinging to Flesh: Embodied Experience in Contemporary Women's Dystopias." Contemporary Women's Writing, vol. 16, no. 3, Dec. 2022, pp. 343–60.
Scott, M. R. & Tribble (2006). Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Scott, M. R. (1997). 'PC analysis of keywords –and key keywords.' System, 25 (2), 233-45.
Scott, M. R. (2000). Focusing on the Text and Its Key Words, in L. Burnard & T. McEnery (Eds.), Rethinking Language Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective, Volume 2. Frankfurt: Peter Lang., pp. 103-122.
Scott, M. (2014). WordSmith tools help. Lexical Analysis Software.
Scott, M. (2021). WordSmith tools [Computer software]. Lexical Analysis Software. https://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/downloads/.
Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Rodopi, 2007.
Wang Kefei, & Hu Xianyao. (2008). A Corpus-Based Study of the Lexical Features of Chinese Translation. Chinese Translators Journal, 29(6), 6. Wang Kefei,&Hu Xianyao (2008) A Corpus based Study on the Characteristics of Chinese Vocabulary in Translation Chinese translation, 29(6), 6.]
Yuan Xia. Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature. Wuhan: Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press, 2020. 34. [Yuan Xia. Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature. Wuhan: Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press: 2020]
Qu, xing. (2021). Renlei mingyun gongtongti de jiazhi guan jichu. (4), 53-55. 35. [Qu Xing. (2021). The Value Foundations of a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity. (4), 53-55.]
Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso, 2020.
Fletcher, William H. (2007). kfNgram (Version 1.3.14) [Computer Software]. Available at http://www.kwicfinder.com/kfNgram/kfNgramHelp.html.
Burgess, Anthony. (2024). novel. Britannica. Retrieved on Apr.13, 2024 from https://www.britannica.com/art/novel.
Anthony, L. (2022). TagAnt [Computer Software] (2.0.5). Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/tagant/.
Scott, M.R. (2008). WordSmith Tools Help Manual. Version 5.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.