ASudyofSenseandSensibiliyfromhePerspeciveofFeminisNarraology_开题报告

Jane Austen and her books have been drawing the attentions from the critics, people would like to appreciate her novels from the various aspects. A memoir of Jane Austen (1870) is her first biography which is written by Jane’s nephew – James Edward Austen-Leigh. The book is concise, and mostly cites from Austen’s letters. To some degree, the book is a valuable gift that filled with abundant affectation to Jane and her books. In the coming few decades, the Austen family reveals more information including: her letters’ collection which son of Jane Austen’s favorite niece publishes it.

William Arthur Austen-Leigh together which Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh collect the material from the different branches of the family finally publish the book Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record, which is called the ‘official’ biography. Elizabeth Jenkins’ Jane Austen is more readable. This book is so welcomed by the readers for it has gone through many editions since its first publication in 1938. It tells Jane’s maturation as an artist. The first book which does an intensive study of Austen and her works is Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (1939). After that, some artistic issues like using of language, narrating skills, and history background have been more emphasized on. For example, Howard Badd’s Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue is mainly about the characters use the conversation to define themselves.

From the year 1970, the study of Jane Austen’s novels became more specific. Warren Roberts studies Austen’s politics in Jane Austen and the French Revolution (1979); Babara Horwitz’s Jane Austen and the Question of Women’s Education concerns about the education issue. In Language of Jane Austen (1972), Norman Page focuses on the conversations in Jane’s books. Margaret Kirkham’s Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (1983) is a milestone of Jane’s study, because this is the first book which advocates Austen as a feminist of her time.

In the twenty-first century, many articles are written on the subject of Austen’s narrative techniques. F. Burrows uses the computer-based statistics to describe Austen’s narration and identifies her major characters’ typical speech patterns in Computation into Criticism (1987). Lloyd Brown’s Bits of Ivory Narrative Techniques in Jane Austen’s Fiction (1973) makes a special and deep analysis of her narration.

The first three stages’ focusing points are the author’s biography, the using of language, marriage theme as well as the characters, all of which are the basic studying of her works. However, in the last stage study, the critics pay their attention to how did the plain woman develop the feminine narrative voice and awake the female consciousness.

Susan S. Lanser is the first one who proposed joining the analytical precision of structuralist narratology with the political concerns of feminism as a way to analyze Austen’s works. In her famous work Fiction of Authority, she analyzes how the narrative authority is established by Jane Austen. And she makes a deep probe of FID (free indirect discourse) in Jane Austen’s novels. In “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion: A Feminist-Narrotological View of Jane Austen”, Robyn Warhol illustrates a point that through the female narrative techniques Austen could make her heroine become the observer of the other characters. Kathy Mezei contends FID “makes it an appropriate space for the complicated interchange between author, narrator, character-focalizer, and reader” in Emma Howards End, and Mrs. Dalloway” (Mezei, 1996:67).

The researches mentioned above not only make huge contribution to Jane Austen’s study, but also demonstrate she plays an extremely important role in literary history. In China, Austen’s novels are wildly accepted not only by the critics but also by the ordinary readers. Her novels have been examined from various aspects, like marriage, dramatic structure, characterization and even her contribution to the English literature. Zhu Hong’s The Study on Jane Austen (1982) makes a detailed study from different perspective and Wang Jinan (2008) probes the feminism consciousness and marriage issues. Of all the aspects being discussed, marriage is the most frequently discussed topic. Scholars analyze her feminist perspective only by focusing on her unconventional heroines and the feminine awareness. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to her feminist narration.

Shen Dan tersely analyzes Austen’s narrative strategies in her book The Study on English and American Narrative Theories (2005). Zheng Hongyan in On Jane Austen’s Feminism in the Perspective of the Change of Her narrative Style (2007) analyzes the reasons why Jane changes her narrative style. Wang Guiqin writes two essays, one is On Jane Austen’s Female Narrative Strategies which discusses Austen’s narrative strategies from both aspects of narrative content and narrative techniques; the other is On the Change of Jane Austen’s Narrative Style (2004), in which she makes a comparison between Northanger Abbey and the other five books.

On the basis of the former study, the thesis will concern with her narrative techniques. By using the unique narrative skills she could finally establish the feminist narrative authority.

Thesis Proposal

1.Introduction

1.1. Jane Austen and Her Times

1.2. Literature Review

1.3 Significance of the Research

2.The Narrative Structure in Sense and Sensibility

2.1. Narrative content

2.2. Characterization

3. Feminist Point of View in Sense and Sensibility

3.1. Third-person Point of View in Sense and Sensibility

3.1.1 Omniscient Point of View

3.1.2Limited Point of View

3.3. Shift of Point of View 

4. Narrative voice in Sense and Sensibility 

4.1 Narrator’s Voice

4.2 Character’s Voice

5.Conclusion

Bibliography

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