Stylistic Analysis of “Shanghai Style” Literary Works by Zhang Ailing (1920-1995) and Wang Anyi (born 1954) Based on Burrows's Delta

There has been an increase in scholarly interest in Shanghai style literature in recent years. There was a number of researchers investigating Shanghai style literature characteristics and some of them analyzed the works of the most prominent authors as well. Literary works of two outstanding exponents of the Shanghai literature style Wang Anyi and Zhang Ailing are claimed to be stylistically similar. However, there has been little research so far to study how similar they are in comparison with other contemporary Chinese writers. This study aims at estimating the stylistic similarity of Wang Anyi and Zhang Ailing’s works by Delta method, which was introduced by John Burrows (2002) and allows to measure the stylistic difference. The corpus was formed of the texts written by Zhang Ailing, Wang Anyi and some other Chinese authors. The results of this study have revealed the stylistic differences in most of Wang Anyi and Zhang Ailing’s works, however, some of their texts have shown stylistic similarities.