Style in Fiction: A Stylistic Analysis of The Bull and the She Devil

Abstract

Stylistics is a critical approach which analyses literary texts by using methods and findings of the science of linguistics. The present study is a stylistic analysis of The Bull and the She Devil (1958), a short story written by Zaibunnisa Hamidullah, a pioneering Pakistani feminist writer, who made a significant contribution in the early years of Pakistani English literature. The story, taken from her collection of short stories titled The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958), deals with the theme of sexuality in a repressed patriarchal society. The stylistic analysis has been conducted by using the model proposed by Leech and Short (2007) which is divided into four broad categories i.e. Lexical Categories, Grammatical Categories, Figures of Speech, and, Cohesion and Context. The study concludes that the author through her peculiar, simple yet subtle style is able to effectively deal with a taboo subject without being too explicit.