A Study Of Sinclair Lewis's Novels In The Perspective Of Cultural Narrative

In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American Nobel Prize winner in literature. It marked the beginning of a new era in the history of American literature, and it realized Emerson's wish for American cultural independence. In Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantery, Lewis criticizes American traditional culture so deeply that "Main Street" and "Babbitt" which are titles for his novels, appear in English dictionaries as items and become a part of American national culture. As a developed country, America's strength and richness is connected with its cultural character. So we choose the perspective of cultural narrative for the study of Lewis's novels. It is argued that Lewis's novels reveal America's national characteristic of "both idealism and pragmatism" through narrating the style of everyday American life. By combining the national cultural characteristics with unique history in 1920s, the rebellious cultural narrative of Lewis's novels reflects the common cultural significance, beliefs and values of that specific historic period of America. The cultural standpoints in his novels influence so many people that they are widely accepted and identified and melt into the long river of American national culture.This dissertation contains three parts: the introduction, the main body, and the conclusion. The main body consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 explores the historical context of the cultural narrative in Lewis's novels. It proposes that Lewis's novels reveal the paradoxical cultural characteristic of "both idealism and pragmatism". The cultural characteristic in question has been very much neglected in existing criticism. Chapter 2 tries to examine the narrative strategies of Lewis's novels. It indicates that the novels connect narrative technique with the reflecting form of "escape" in American cultural characteristic, and demonstrates the rebellions cultural narrative features of "modern realism "and other multiple narrative strategies. Chapter 3 analyzes the cultural features of the main characters in Lewis's novels in connection with such national characteristic as "both idealism and pragmatism" from dual theoretical perspectives of Franklin's pragmatism and Emerson's transcendentalism. Chapter 4 explores the cultural features of social groups, revealing "both idealism and pragmatism" of them from the perspective of consumer culture. Chapter 5 investigates into the positive and admirable points to American cultural spirits in Lewis's fiction from the perspective of narrative ethics.The study of the cultural narrative in Lewis's novels from the five different perspectives enable us to see the uniqueness and richness of American culture characteristic of "both idealism and pragmatism." This way of study penetrates into numerous implications and inner connection which have been neglected in existing criticism. The study shows that we can better explain the internal connections between the rich cultural content and diversified narrative forms of the novels by grasping its unique national cultural characteristic in the 1920s. We can therefore see more clearly Lewis's inheritance of the narrative tradition and his creative development based on his foreseeing and critical cultural vision.