Stylistics In Alice Walker's The Color Purple And The Handmaids Tale

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I. Introduction Stylistics is one of the eminent branches of linguistics. It is a linguistic approach that closes to literary criticism. In addition, stylistics involves both linguistic and literary studies. In the last few years, there has been growing interest in Stylistics as it has been gaining its importance and becoming most frequently used. Qualitative and quantitative approaches are deemed as the most two substantial methods for Stylistics. Initially, Stylistics was a qualitative field but after developing computer software it began to be a qualitative-quantitative filed. According to Dawson (2002), the research methodology mainly depends on its method which is considered the device the researcher uses to collect data and information (p.14). The two literary texts (novels) that the researcher is going to work on are The Color Purple and The Handmaid’s Tale. The African- American novelist Alice Walker is always concerned with presenting the problems of females especially black women because they are doubly oppressed due to their gender and their color. In order to portray their struggle, she wrote one of the marvelous novels The Color Purple which was published in 1982. As for the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who shares the same interest with Alice Walker, she depicted the struggle of women and how they are victimized by the patriarchal society in her brilliant novel The Handmaid’s Tale that was published in 1985. As a result of the existence of