Author(s)

Siyuan Peng

Corresponding Author

Siyuan Peng

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose is acclaimed for its aesthetic effects and profound themes. It is the various stylistic features that facilitate him to achieve such success. Foregrounding is an in-depth theory and a crucial means to analyze stylistic features both qualitatively and quantitatively. This paper reviews the previous studies on this fairy tale and the development of foregrounding and discusses the style of Wilde’s language from different types of deviation and rhetorical devices such as parallelism and repetition, in order to attain a comprehensive view of the beauty of Wilde’s language in this world-famous masterpiece.

Keywords

Foregrounding, Stylistics, The nightingale and the rose, Oscar wilde