Concern For The Destiny Of British Empire

Ford Madox Ford was a master of British modernism.Living in the late Victorian society,Ford devoted himself to concerning with Britsh culture and society during the period of social change.Among Ford's works,his masterpiece The Good Soldier was a typical example in point.The novel primarily told a story about complex love entanglement and conflicts between the British upper-class aristocratic gentleman,Edward couple and the American businessman Dowell couple,which happened before the First World War.Since the 1960 s,foreign scholars began to interpret this work from various angles actively.Compared with foreign scholars,domestic academic circle principally centered on the fields of narratology,ethics,and so forth,and research achievement was relatively insufficient and incomplete.Therefore,this thesis attempts to take advantage of Space criticism theory,by the explanation and analysis of the text space,observes Ford's concern for the destiny of British Empire.Around the 1990 s,the rise of "Space" in the interdisciplinary research questioned and deconstructed the concept of Space-Time,which was previously dominated by time.Space begins to be a text,endowed with profound cultural meaning.Space has also become a decisive perspective of literary criticism.Space criticism is a combination of literary criticism and cultural geography,an interdisciplinary method of criticism.As for this thesis,French scholar Heri Lefebvre's and British scholar Mike Crang's Space theory are used to interpret the Spaces in Ford's The Good Soldier.Lefebvre contended the physical world was a kind space of symbolic meaning with the charcteristics of being percieveed and conceieved.For Branshaw Manor,as the domestic space,which was not just a building standing in the British countryside,the background of the story,but also a symbolic space for personal and national identity of Edward.For the new estate owner,American businessman Dowell,the manor space represented his sense of nothingness and cultural rootlessness indeed.Through the interpretation of community spaces between Protestant representative Edward and his wife-Catholic representative Leonora,the paper strives to express Leonora–the Other's identity construction process under the circumstances of religious opposition in the late Victorian society.In addition,through an intepretation of the space source--Body,the paper offers a perspective to re-examine the major characters:Edward,Leonora,Florence,to observe how they accomplish Body Space's construction and deconstruction in their own ways.This paper includes three parts: introduction,main body and conculsion.The first part is an introduction,which refers to a brief introduction to Ford's life and his representative work,The Good Soldier.Finally a literature review and the research perspective of this paper will be provided.The main body includes four chapters as follows: the first chapter discusses the space theory,then elaborately illustrates Lefebvre's and Mike Crang's spatial criticism theory.The second chapter analysises the domestic space in The Good Soldier.The chapter sets British aristocrat Edward's country house--Branshaw Manor as the research object,attempts to conclude that Branshaw Manor is not only a personal status symbol of Edward,but also a symbol of Britain.With the decline of the aristocracy which Edward represented,the symbolic connotation of country house changed.Finally,as American businessman Dowell bought Branshaw Manor,and it turned out to be a domestic space of inner emptiness and cultural rootlessness for Dowel.The third chapter will take advantage of Mike Crang's Other Space theoey to explore the construction process of Leonora's Other Identity under the background of religious opposition in the late Victorian society.The fourth chapter interprets the main characters Edward's,Leonora's,Florence's Body Space,attempting to explore Edward's efforts in building Body Space of a traditional,ancient gentleman;Leonora's struggle of getting rid of Body discipline;Florence's desire for building a British noblewoman Body Space.The last part is a conclusion.By exploring The Good Soldier from the perspective of Space theory,we can glimpse Ford's concern for British Empire in the transitional period from the 19 th century to the 20^th century.