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INTRODUCTIONOscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day.
It seems rather difficult to go into details with regards to lots of expressive means and stylistic devices in Oscar Wilde's plays as they are too many, forming his inimitable individual style. As it is known stylistics treats with special means of the language that help us to have vivid and interesting speech and O. Wilde's plays considered to be a real treasure for stylistic research [Kazantsev 2006: 4]. These facts underline urgency and the importance of the topic of our scientific paper: "Individual Stylistic Features of Oscar Wilde's Plays".
Besides it the underpinnings of this scientific paper also rest on various theoretical research and scientific articles concerning stylistics and various stylistic aspects (I. V.Arnold, N. E.Enkvist, I. R.Galperin, R. R.Gelgart, I. V.Gubbenet, O. K.Denisova, K. A.Dolinin, L. I.Donetskih, E. G.Kovalevskaya, V.A. Kukharenko, L. Y.Maksimov, V. I.Prokhorova, T. A.Sebeok, E. G.Soshalskaya, V. V.Vinogradov, A. Warner, etc.).
As the object of the work we considered Oscar Wilde's plays.
The subject of the paper - The individual stylistic features of Oscar Wilde's plays.
To find out individual stylistic features of Oscar Wilde's plays with the help of lexical and syntactical EM and SD analysis of O. Wilde's texts.
The scientific paper consists of introduction, two parts, conclusion and bibliography.
The aesthetic movement, represented by the school of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had a permanent influence on English decorative art and O. Wilde itself, his literary views. As the leading aesthete in Britain, O. Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities of his day. Though he was sometimes ridiculed for them, his paradoxes and witty sayings were quoted on all sides. [Ross 2008: 4] And we should mention that they are still true-life.
Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte invited O. Wilde for a lecture tour of North America (1881) considered him to be one of the aesthetic movement's charming personalities. Coming to America Wilde reputedly told a customs officer that "I have nothing to declare except my genius", continuing practice his challenging behavior.
Oscar Wilde sometimes pretended that art was more important than morality, but that was mere play-acting. Morality or immorality was more important than art to him and everyone else. But the very cloud of tragedy that rested on his career makes it easier to treat him as a mere artist now. His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which our life is incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense one might call it a perfect life. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil from his books; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment. The hope and fault are always near in his plays [Daily News 1909].
O. Wilde professed to stand as a solitary artistic soul apart from the public. He professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. But the truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. He studied them with exquisite attention, and knew exactly how to shock and how to please them. He disgusts them with new truths, he knew how to say the precise thing which, whether true or false, is irresistible [Harris 2007: 13]. As, for example, "I can resist everything but temptation" .
R. Ross, commenting on Wilde's behavior and challenging manner of expression, suggested that Wilde's conduct was more of a bid for notoriety rather than the author devotion to beauty and the aesthetic in his books. ...Wilde's challenging life, being full of scandals, influenced on his manner of writing making it a real challenge to society as all his writings [Ross 2008: 5] and understanding of it offers a clue to the profound exploration of his individual literary style and various expressive means and stylistic devices in Oscar Wilde's plays.1.2. O. Wilde's creative genius and his writingsOscar Wilde was sure that "no artist desires to prove anything, ....the artist must create and reveal the truth" and that is why he is most famous for his sophisticated, brilliantly witty plays, which were the first since the comedies of R. Sheridan and O. Goldsmith to have both dramatic and literary merit.
Wilde's stories and essays were well received, but his creative genius found its highest expression in his plays - Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which were all extremely clever and filled with pithy epigrams and paradoxes. O. Wilde explained away their lack of depth by saying that he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his books. He also wrote two historical tragedies, The Duchess of Padua (1892) and Salomé (1893).
Wilde's only novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890), attracted much attention, and his sayings past from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age. This novel covers the whole range of human experience and imagination.
The career of Oscar Wilde was brief, but, from its beginnings, success smiled on him and he quickly achieved a triumph. Some of his works, his verse, his essays - "Intentions", his fairy tales, his poems in prose "The House of Pomegranates", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", had affirmed that he was a pure artist and a great writer, for certain of his pages are as beautiful as the most beautiful in English prose. But these works were only amusements for him, and versatile mind, so brilliant, so delicately ironic, so paradoxical, found a medium of expression, which perfectly suited his uncommon gifts; it was the theatre.
The theatre played the very important role in Wilde's life. English drama was reborn near the end of the Victorian age. Many critics said that O. Wilde was perhaps less then a mature poet, but a good critic, and a splendid playwright [Ross 2008: 5].
Wilde's first dramatic works - early tragedies "Vera; or the Nihilists" (1880) and "The Duchess of Padua" (1883), imitative and artistically weak, had no stable success on the stage. Then there were published his brilliant novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and the critical essays "The Intentions". In these books there were reflected the basic principles of Wilde's aesthetics.
O. Wilde's plays were written in a light satirical vein, cultured and refined, and in good taste. His characters served as the mouths to enunciate the author's exquisitely funny remarks on society.
The reputation of Oscar Wilde as a writer and a critic was doubtful for many critics, but almost all of them considered him to be a brilliant dramatist of his time. Wilde's fame rests chiefly on his comedies of fashionable life: "Lady Windermere's Fan", "An Ideal Husband", "A Woman of No Importance" and "The Importance of Being Earnest". The sparkling wit and vivacity, characteristic of these plays, helped them to keep the stage for more than half a century. In spite of their superficial drawing-room treatment of human problems, they are still attractive to numerous theatergoers because of their brilliancy of dialogue and entertaining plot.
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade name of the firm. That is all"; "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose"; "Life is far too important a thing to talk seriously about it" and many others.
In 1895 Wilde was at the peak of his career and had three hit plays running at the same time. At the same year he found himself under the trial. As a result O. Wilde became involved in a hopeless legal dispute and was sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor. After his release in 1897, Wilde published "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", a poem of considerable but unequal power. This poem gave the impression that he was again going to produce works worthy of his talents. But it was his last word to the world.
For the last three years he had lived abroad. Ruined in health, finances and creative energy, but with his characteristic wit, he died in France in 1990. But the voices of Wilde's brilliant plays continue to be heard. And it is not the exaggeration to call his plays one of the most wittiest comedies of the nineteenth century and our days.
2.1. Definition of style and its peculiaritiesBefore to begin the topic research it is necessary to highlight and clarify the term "style" and its peculiarities. It is important to mention that the word "style" has a very broad meaning. The style of any period is the result of a variety of complex and shifting pressures and influences. [Arnold 1975: 12] Books reflect our experience, but our experience is also shaped by the books. That is why there is the constant interaction between life and literature, life and literary style of any writer as we could see from our analysis in the previous part of our paper.
So we could underline three main influences that pressure on the individual writer's style: 1) his personality, his philosophy and own way of thinking and feeling that determines his mode of expression; 2) the occasion on which he is writing, the particular purpose; 3) the influence of the age in which he lives. In other words, a writer's style is his individual and creative choice of the resources of the language [Gelgardt 1979: 4]. So there are many definitions of style. According to R. Chapman, a good style of writing has three qualities, which may be described as accuracy, ease and grace [Warner 2003: 142]. According to G.-L. Buffon, in reality the style is the man himself [ibid: 141]. That is why the essence of style is multi-topic and its peculiarities and components are carefully explored by the separate scientific branch - stylistics.
The two objectives of stylistics are clearly discernible as two separate fields of investigation. The types of texts can be analyzed if their linguistic components are presented in their interaction, thus, revealing the unbreakable unity and transparency of constructions of a given type. The types of texts that are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of the communication are called functional styles of language (FS). The special media of language which secure the desirable effect of the utterance are called stylistic devices (SD) and expressive means (EM).
The first field of investigation - SDs and EMs, necessarily touches upon such general language problems as the aesthetic function of language, synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea, emotional colouring in language, the interrelation between language and thought, the individual manner of an author in making use of language and a number of other issues. The second field - functional styles, touches upon such most general linguistic issues as oral and written varieties of language, the notion of literary language, the constituents of texts larger than the sentence, the generative aspect of literary texts and some others.
The brief outline of the most characteristic features of the language style and its components shows that there are a great number of features which could be explored. In our scientific work we'll investigate some of them with the help of O'Wilde's brilliant plays.
2.2. Lexical EM and SD analysis of O. Wilde's textsAfter understanding the concept of style we could logically start analyzing some lexical expressive means and stylistic devices used by Oscar Wilde in his plays.
Epigrams and paradoxes as stylistic devices are usually used in the Present Indefinite Tense which makes them abstract.
The majority critics of the nineteenth century noted that O. Wilde was the most paradoxical writer of his time.
In Wilde's paradoxes and epigrams the verb "to be" is widely used. This verb intensifies the genetic function and makes aphorisms and paradoxes humorous. It makes also the ironical definition of phenomena of life.
E. g. "A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain." (p.67).
One of the most characteristic and essential features of epigrams and paradoxes is their shortness and conciseness. They are achieved by the syntactical pattern of an epigram or paradox. The syntax of these stylistic devices is laconic and clear - cut.
E. g. "Do not use bid words. They mean so little" (p.253).
In these examples we can see the parallel constructions widely used by Oscar Wilde. They serve a perfect means of creating the clear-cut syntax of epigrams and paradoxes.
Like many other stylistic devices, irony does not exist outside the context.
The word "advice" is suggested for acceptance if it is good and for rejection if it is not good, but not for passing on it. In fact, Lord Goring, the speaker of this phrase, is a serious person, who knows that a good advice may be very useful.
We can find pun even in the titles of Oscar Wilde's plays, e. g. "The Importance of Being Earnest". But to understand this pun we must read the whole play, because the name of the hero and the adjective meaning "seriously-minded" are both existing in our mind.
Pun is based on the effect of deceived expectation, because unpredictability in it is expressed either in the appearance of the elements of the text unusual for the reader or in the unexpected reaction of the addressee of the dialogue.
For Oscar Wilde pun is one of the most effective means used for creating wit, brilliancy and colourfulness of his dialogues for criticism of bourgeois morality. At the same time the puns serve for showing the author's ideas and thoughts.
These examples show that the play on words has a great influence on the reader. The speech of the hero becomes more vivid and interesting.
Most of Wilde's puns are based on polysemy.
E. g. "Lady H.: she lets her clever tongue run away with her.
In this example the pun is realised in the remark of the second person. The first meaning of the expression "to run away with" - is "not to be aware of what you are speaking", and the second meaning is "to make off taking something with you". The first meaning is figurative and the second is direct.
As a rule, when two meanings of the word are played upon, one of them is direct, the other is figurative, which can be illustrated by some of the above mentioned examples. So, we can see, that irony and pun also play the very important role in Wilde's plays. The effect of these stylistic devices is based on the author's attitude to the English bourgeois society. Thus irony and pun help O. Wilde to show that majority of his heroes are the typical representatives of the bourgeois society: thoughtless, frivolous, greedy, envious, mercenary people. A play upon contrasts and contradictions lies at the basis of author's sarcastic method in portraying his characters. The dynamic quality of Wilde's plays is increased by the frequent ironical sentences and puns. These stylistic devices convey the vivid sense of reality in the picture of the 19-th century English upper-class society.
"She" and "statuette" belong to heterogeneous classes of objects and Wilde has found that the beauty of Mabel Chiltern may be compared with the beauty of the ancient Tanagra statuette. Of the two concepts brought together in the Simile - one characterized (Mabel Chiltern), and the other characterizing (Statuette) - the feature intensified will be more inherent in the latter than in the former. Moreover, the object characterized, is seen in quite a new and unexpected light, because the author as it were, imposes this feature on it.
The properties of an object may be viewed from different angles. Accordingly, similes may be based on adjective-attributes, adverbs-modifiers, verb-predicates, etc.
So, simile is another stylistic device frequently used by Oscar Wilde in his plays. It shows the individual viewpoint of the author on different objects, actions, and phenomena. The literary similes in his plays gain especially wonderful character as they make the text more expressive and more interesting.
Epithet on the whole shows purely individual emotional attitude of the speaker towards the object spoken of, it describes the object as it appears to the speaker. Its basic features are its emotiveness and subjectivity: the characteristic attached to the object to qualify it is always chosen by the speaker himself.
Epithet has remained over the centuries the most widely used stylistic device, it offers the ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author's partial and subjective viewpoint, which is indispensable in creative prose. In his plays O. Wilde used very colorful epithets, which sometimes help him to show the difference between pretence and reality.
Wilde's epithets give a brilliant colour and wonderful witticism to his plays. With the help of epithets Wilde's heroes are more interesting, their speech is more emotive; they involve the reader in their reality, in their life. His epithets are based on different sources, such as nature, art, history, literature, mythology, everyday life, man, etc. They reflect Wilde's opinions and viewpoints about different things. They give emphasis and rhythm to the text.
The examples above shows that Oscar Wilde may be really called a master of colorful and vivid epithets.
In hyperbole there is always a transference of meaning as there is discrepancy with objective reality. The words are no used in their direct sense.
In order to depict the degree of the love of his character Wilde resorts to the use of these hyperboles. So one of the most important function of hyperbole is the emotional expressiveness.
In other hyperboles O. Wilde uses the exaggeration of the quantitative aspect.
They make their way not on the direct meaning, but on the great emotional influence. But literary hyperbole is not the simple speech figure. They may be also called the means of artistic characterization. It is one of the most important means of building up the plot of the text, the imagery and expressiveness. It is the transmission of the author's thought. In order to create his hyperboles O. Wilde uses such words as "hundreds", "thousands", "all the time", "nothing in the world", etc. Wilde's hyperboles bring the brightness, expressiveness and the emotional color of the language.
The metaphors reveal the attitude of the writer to the object, action or concept and express his views. They may also reflect the literary school which he belongs and the epoch in which he lives. Oscar Wilde's fine metaphors play an important role in portraying his heroes, their feelings and thoughts.
A metaphor can exist only within a context. A separate word isolated from the context has its general meaning. Metaphor plays an important role in the development of language. Words acquire new meanings by transference.
E. g. "Lord Illingworth: That silly Puritan girl making a scene merely because I wanted to kiss her. What harm is there in a kiss?
Mrs. Arbuthnot: A kiss may ruin a human life. I know that too well."(p.166).
The metaphorical effect of this sentence is based on the personal feelings of Mrs. Arbuthnot. Her sad experience of life sounds in this phrase. When she was young, she had a great love. But her passion had left her and "her life was ruined." That is why this metaphor has a true effective power when it is pronounced by Mrs. Arbuthnot.
Metaphors can be classified according to their degree of unexpectedness. Thus, metaphors which are absolutely unexpected, that is are quite unpredictable, are called genuine metaphors. Wilde's metaphors develop the reader's imagination. At the same time the author reflects his own point of view.
The charm of O. Wilde's plays is due to the mixture of poetic metaphors and real images. The author does not convince the reader to make the resulting points, but he makes him indirectly judge the heroes and clear the situation. The meanings of O. Wildes metaphors are understandable for any reader, of any age and any interests. They produce a dynamic character of the plot and show that Wilde is a man of genius.
So metonymy is a transference of meaning based on a logical or physical connection between things. It is one of the means of forming the new meanings of words in the language.
Oscar Wilde does not pay much attention to metonymy. But his metonymies have a great potential power. They reach the emotional reliability, which creates the effect of reader's presence in the literary world.
In these examples we can see the same metonymy, that is used by the same word "world". Here the author means the people who love in the world. Here we also can see that container is used instead of the thing contained: "world" instead of "people".
Making a conclusion to analyzing stylistic devices we can say that Oscar Wilde used really a great number of them in his plays. And they all helped him really ingeniously express his thoughts and feelings, making his individual style expressive and vivid, and his texts plain, close and understandable to everybody.
So repetition is a powerful means of emphasis, it adds rhythm and balance to the utterance. O. Wilde's repetitions help us to be closer to the hero, to understand his feelings. They also can be considered as a powerful mean of emphasis and coloring of individual author's style as they add rhythm and balance to the text.
In the meantime O. Wilde rather often used in his plays parallel constructions - a device which may be encountered not so much in the sentence as in the macro-structures dealt with earlier, with the syntactical whole and the paragraph. The necessary condition in parallel construction is identical, or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence". [Galperin 2002: 159] Parallel constructions could be called a perfect mean of creating the clean-cut syntax of O. Wilde plays. They deal with logical, rhythmic, emotive and expressive aspects of the utterance and create rhythmical shape of the sentence, making it more emotional, vivid and even musical, adding wonderful sound and expressiveness.
Analyzing this sentence we can see the musical chain of enumeration. It gives more objective value of the character's speech, shows the variety of thoughts and feelings.
One of the most typical syntactical stylistic device for Wilde's plays is ellipsis - an intentional omission from an utterance of one or more words. [Sosnovskaya 2004: 68] The meaning of omitted words is easy to understand by the context.
Ellipsis gives the picture of real life, real people, their feelings and emotions in O. Wilde's plays. It adds a certain charm to the conversation.
The effect of a cross order of words in this example produces an ironic character. Like parallel construction, chiasmus contributes to the rhythmical quality of the utterance in O. Wilde's texts.
Here we can see the semantic contrast, which is formed with the help of objectively contrasting pair "plain - beautiful", "always - never".
All the examples above show that syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices played a very important role in Oscar Wilde's style. With the help of them Oscar Wilde, who was a talented writer, can make us feel the way he wants. We can find different syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices in Oscar Wilde's plays such as parallel constructions, repetition, chiasmus, antithesis and many others. These expressive means help the author to create his individual elegant, humorous and challenging style.
CONCLUSIONHaving analyzed the four plays of Oscar Wilde: "Lady Windermere's Fan", "A Woman of No Importance", "An Ideal Husband", "The Importance of Being Earnest", we came to a conclusion that O. Wilde skilful, playing, understandable to everybody and challenging to the society with its truth individual style was formed with the help of a great variety of lexical and syntactical stylistic devices and expressive means.
Among the lexical ones we can see epigrams and paradoxes which played one of the most important roles in Wilde's plays. With the help of these stylistic devices Wilde reflects his own viewpoints on the society of his time, his opinions about life, love and friendship, men and women. Paradoxes and epigrams create the individuality of Oscar Wilde and made him worldwide famous for many brilliant and the wittiest of them.
The specific, cynical quality of Wilde's irony is manifested in his manner of writing. This device allowed Wilde to reveal incongruity of the world around him and to show the viciousness of the upper-class society.
Pun was another effective mean used for creating wit, brilliancy and colourfulness of O. Wilde's dialogues, serving for his criticism of bourgeois morality, showing the author's ideas and thoughts.
The dynamic quality of Wilde's plays is increased by the frequent ironical sentences and puns. These stylistic devices convey the vivid sense of reality in the picture of the 19-th century English upper-class society.
Wilde's realism with its wonderful epigrams and paradoxes, brilliant irony and amusing puns initiates the beginning of a new era in the development of the English play.
Wilde's epithets also give a brilliant color and wonderful witticism to his plays a and his literary style. With the help of epithets Wilde's heroes are more interesting, their speech is more emotive; they involve the reader in their reality, in their life. Wilde uses a great amount of epithets in his plays. They are based on different sources, such as nature, art, history, literature, mythology, everyday life, man, etc. Wilde may be also called a master of colourful and vivid epithets.
The charm of O. Wilde's plays and his style can be also seen due to the mixture of poetic metaphors and real images. The author does not convince the reader to make the resulting points, but he makes him indirectly judge the heroes and clear the situation. The meanings of O. Wildes metaphors are understandable for any reader, of any age and any interests. They produce a dynamic character of the plot and show that Wilde is a man of genius.
Simile is another interesting stylistic device used by Oscar Wilde in his plays. It shows the individual viewpoint of the author on different objects, actions, and phenomena.
Hyperbole is also frequently used by O. Wilde. In order to create his hyperboles O. Wilde uses such words as "hundreds", "thousands", "all the time", "nothing in the world", etc. Wilde's hyperboles bring the brightness, expressiveness and the emotional color of his style. Hyperbole is like a magnifying glass; it helps to observe in details his plays and style.
As a brief conclusion we can say that Oscar Wilde resorts to the use of a great number of stylistic devices in his plays.
Speaking about syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices in O. Wilde's play we can also see plenty of them, forming his individual style.
For example Wilde's repetitions help us to be closer to the hero, to understand his feelings. They also can be considered as a powerful mean of emphasis and coloring of individual author's style as they add rhythm and balance to the text.
Among other syntactical expressive means used by Oscar Wilde we can see inversion, but Oscar Wilde doesn't pay much attention to it.
Besides it we can see parallel constructions that could be called a perfect mean of creating the clean-cut syntax of O. Wilde plays. They deal with logical, rhythmic, emotive and expressive aspects of the utterance and create rhythmical shape of the sentence, making it more emotional, vivid and even musical.
One of the most typical syntactical stylistic device for Wilde's plays is ellipsis which gives the picture of real life, real people, their feelings and emotions in O. Wilde's plays. It adds a certain charm to the conversation.
In O. Wilde's plays we can also find lexico-syntactical stylistic devices, for example chiasmus. Like parallel construction, chiasmus contributes to the rhythmical quality of the utterance in O. Wilde's texts.
We came to the conclusion that for Oscar Wilde language was the most important way for expression of his thoughts and feelings. According to the examples mentioned in our scientific paper, we can see that Wilde's language is very expressive and vivid, and at the same time it is plain and understandable to any reader and this language like a brush paints really ingenious, vivid, individual style of author.
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 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V.