The Conflicts Between Ethics And Desire-Interpretation Of Graham Swift’s Works From Ethical Literary Criticism

Graham Swift,born in London in 1949,is a well-known contemporary British novelist and is famous in British academic circles.Scholars at home and abroad have given Graham Swift a wide and high degree of attention,and their journals,papers,to varying degrees,have analyzed Swift and his works in detail.The publication of Waterland in 1983 won him the Booker Prize nomination and won the Guardian novel Award and other awards.In 1996,his sixth novel,Last Orders won him the Booker Prize of that year,which established his important position in the contemporary British literary world.In 2011,Swift’s new work Wish You Were Here was published,translated into Chinese the following year and won the award of Best Foreign Fiction of the year 2012.The research on Graham Swift’s novels at home and abroad mainly focuses on the themes of exploring works from the perspective of history,trauma narration,life and death and post-modernism.Few people analyze Swift’s works from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.And there are few people study three works of Swift’s representative works,Waterland,Last Orders and Wish You Were Here together.Therefore,the author will start with ethical literary criticism,analyze the theoretical conclusion of the three works in depth and analyze Swift’s own ethical values in order to better understand the charm of Swift’s works.By restoring the ethical events,this thesis aims to analyze ethical choice,ethical order and ethical identity in Graham Swift’s three representative works: Waterland,Last Orders and Wish You were Here.It applies ethical literary criticism to the analysis of the deep ethical characteristics in the works and analyzes the author’s ethical construction.It is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introductory part,introducing the author and his three works,ethical literary criticism and related literature review.The second chapter discusses the dilemma of ethical choices faced by the protagonists in the novels: hesitation of conservatism and innovation,wandering between morality and kinship and suffering of responsibility and evasion.The third chapter discusses the confusion of the protagonists in the novels when facing ethical order: standoff between family and aspiration,confrontation between orderliness and indulgence and struggle between order-abiding and solace-seeking.The fourth chapter discusses the perplexity of ethical identity of the protagonists in the novels: oscillation of ethical identity of wife,contradiction ofethical identity of husband and flounder of ethical identity of father.The fifth chapter summarizes the whole thesis as well as the author’s ethical pursuit: everyone follows ethical order,face up to the ethical identity,make the correct ethical choice,and correctly view and deal with the relationship between ethics and desire.