Characterization

The novel as a modern literary genre is generally regarded as the realization of its main character's journey from immaturity to a status of maturity. The character, usually an uncomplicated person unable to cope with the complexities of life at first, gains an insight and understanding to handle his/her complex situation accordingly later in the novel. It is usually agreed in both literary criticism and linguistic criticism of literature that everything about a character should be established from the evidence of the text (see Fowler, 1977 & 1996 and Peck & Coyle, 2002, for instance). In the present study, the language of Tom Joad, the main character in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, was analyzed to reveal how his social position is established and how his transformation from a young farm-hand holding a carpe diem philosophy to a socially-wise reformist with a commitment to bettering the future is substantialized. Oriented towards a linguistic study of literature, the present paper employsSystemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the analytic framework. The findings of the study may be useful especially for those involved in teaching English language through literature.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a cornerstone of Gothic literature, renowned for its dark settings and themes of death, isolation, and vengeance, all of which evoke terror. These elements create profound unease in readers, which Sigmund Freud calls the uncanny. While Freud’s psychoanalytic account emphasizes repressed fears and childhood anxieties, Nicholas Royle’s expanded theory redefines the uncanny as a literary mode which destabilizes identity. This article aims to apply Royle’s theoretical framework to analyze Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, focusing on five central concepts: silence and isolation, thought, the double, the phantom, and the death drive and repetition. From this vantage point, the study depicts how silence resounds with ghostly echoes in solitude, thought can make the identity fractured, doubling becomes a rupture of the self, the phantom uncovers hidden traumas and inherited secrets, and the death drive takes form as compulsive repetition which haunts the mind. These elements reframe the novel’s horror as uncanny. The findings suggest that through a Roylean perspective on the uncanny, Shelley’s Frankenstein transcends traditional Gothic boundaries by dramatizing the instability of the self and the persistence of what cannot be fully known or repressed.