Use of Point of View in A Song of Ice and Fire

It consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I summarized Point of View, focusing on some of its features, such as speech and thought presentation, modality, transitivity and so on. In this first part, I tried to present models for the stylistic analysis of Point of View that would later be the basis for my own analysis of the work. Because of the overalpping of many different categories and definitions regarding Point of View, each model might share some common traits with another, while still being different overall. Disentangling these topics was the biggest difficulty in writing this section. In the second chapter, after brief preliminary remarks on Fantasy Literature, I introduced Martin's work, A Song of Ice and Fire. I focused particularly on the features that contribute to enrich this work's genre, making it a very multifaceted work. I also tried to briefly summarize the huge and intricated plot of A Song of Ice and Fire that developed through five books and that will see further development in the last two volumes to follow. In this second part, some information concerning the fandom of Martin's work is also provided: personally, I believe it to be quite significant that this work aroused such a widespread interest in it. I find surprising how a work as successful as A Song of Ice and Fire, which sold over seventy million copies worldwide (Brown, 2016), has received little to no space in handbooks treating Fantasy Literature, at least as far as my experience is concerned: among the materials that I consulted while writing this work, Martin's masterpiece is only briefly mentioned in A Guide to Fantasy Literature: Thoughts on Stories of Wonder & Enchantment (Martin P., 2009). Although I believe that the fact that the series has not been completed yet might have played some role in leaving it out of most handbooks, I am genuinely astonished by the lack of academic interest in A Song of Ice and Fire. As a result, in my search for information about Martin's work, I mostly relied on articles and interviews I found online. In the third and last chapter, after explaining the feature of POV characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, a selection of chapters is collected in two corpora, each corpus grouping the chapters written from the point of view of a certain character, namely Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister. After clarifying the reasons behind the choice of these characters and those that underlie choice of the chapters in the corpora, I proceeded to analyze the use of Point of View in each corpus.