Perdawdy Ismail Abdulrahaman. An Analysis of the Narrative Structure of Three American Short Stories: A Linguistic Approach

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016. — 125 pages. — ISBN: 978-3-659-90805-7.The present book aims at introducing narrative discourse and analysing the narrative structure of three short stories by O’Henry: ‘A Strange Story’, ‘The Robe of Peace’ and ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’. The following hypotheses are made:Narrative texts can be regarded as long sentences. Sentence structure and narrative structure share common features.
The structure of oral narratives is, to some extent, similar to that of written ones. In order to test the first hypothesis, Greimas’ (1966) and Genette’s (1972) structural models are to be adopted. Labov’s (1972) linguistic model is to be followed for testing the second one.This study falls into five chapters.Theoretical Background
The Structuralist Approach and the Selected Short Stories by O’Henry
Labov's Approach and the Short Stories
Conclusions and Suggestions