Excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wild Through A Grammatical- Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This research paper presents a comprehensive grammatical analysis to three Excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The analysis is performed stylistically depending on a grammatical approach. The aim is showing the way Wilde uses language, how he engages language as a device to display the beauty of English language itself, and how he used his talented ability to organize language. This act of his produced the most read novel since it was written. The analysis carried on engaging Leech and Shorts’ framework and Foregrounding. The main conclusion arrived at is that the excellence of Wilde’s language style lies in its pure zest of the irrelevances in using grammatical structures that the significant arrangement of these into an organic whole. Wilde’s language in its artistic way is not an act of intelligence, it is a style of completion.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Wilde’s only novel. It belongs to Gothic, philosophical, suspense, and comedy of manners genre. It first appeared as a novella in the June 20, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Dorian Gray received with criticism by critics and readers of being an immoral story. Later, Wilde published an expanded and revised version of the story in book form the next year. He included a preface that contained a biting response to his critics. He asserted that in literature there is no moral or immoral art. In his view, a book is either written well or written poorly