The Syntactic Style of Cultural Revolution Literature

The Syntactic Style of Cultural Revolution LiteratureLan Yang

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Abstract:  This paper investigates the language of official literature produced during the Cultural Revolution (CR), concentrating on linguo-stylistic characteristics of sentences, relating to length, rhyming, parallelism, quotation and grammaticality. By demonstrating the intended syntactic features, it aims to explore the language’s aesthetic and stylistic characteristics and functions. A comparative perspective is made of the CR literary language with that of pre-CR and post-CR literature.

Keywords: formalist criticism, sociological criticism, linguo-stylistics, stylistic register, syntactic style, CR literature