Alice Monroe's Novel Research

From a “Housewives writer” of Wingham,Ontario Canada,to the top of the world Nobel Prize for literature,Alice Munro finished her gorgeous transformation.She's known as the “master of the contemporary short story”,was also praised as “our era of Chekhov”.Munro has written and published hundreds of short stories,including in 14 short stories,9 of them have been translated and introduced to China.She has gained the worldwide reputation in writing.The thesis' research is mainly based on Munro's stories which were translated into Chinese,by using various research methods,such as new historicism criticism,feminist criticism and narrative art research,taking account of the society,culture,history and living background of that time,exploring her stories' changing features and artistic characteristics,and compares Munro with the same time writer to carry on the contrast analysis,hoping to describe the panorama of her works,and making the objective evaluation.Except for introduction part,this thesis is composed of six chapters.For the Introduction Part,there are four questions are discussed.Firstly,the reasons why this thesis chooses Munros' stories as the research topic and what's the significance of the research about her.Secondly,the current research trend both from the respective point of view of Chinese and from the world is discussed,each work is summarized according to the main points of the study.Thirdly,the thesis is about research aims and contents,explaining her stories' creative theme,characters change,narrative and artistic style,compensating for the imbalance of domestic research.Fourthly,this thesis talks about the research approaches and innovativeness,concluding this article in methodological and innovative way.Chapter One is about stories' writing background of Munro.The rise of Munro's stories is not a accidental phenomenon in contemporary Canadian English literary world,but on the specific social and historical background and literary development foundation.Canadian literature is deeply influenced by British and American literature,its attitude is very modest,there are four stages of development from the country's funding date.This is a solid foundation for the writing.Then introduce her life experience and writing stage,personal growth experiences has a profound impact on the writing of story.She began writing at puberty,there are the early period(1949-1972),the mid-term period(1973-1990)and the late period(1991 to now).She laid the leading position in the domestic literary circles through the first two periods,won the reputation of the world when her old,promoting Canadian literature into the world literature,too.Chapter Two is about the writing themes of Munro's stories.There are always two themes in Munro's writing: the themes of women and literary regionalism.At different stages of creation,they presents different characteristics.The female characters in Munro's stories are reasonable.At that time,Women's liberation movement popular in the international community,Munro's stories were detailed description of that movements.Her characters are fictional characters with consciousness and rebellious,finding and constructing their own personal identity.By summing up these themes,to find its cause and development changes,this is more advantageous for reading.The themes of regional literature are more complex.Munro inherited the fine tradition of Canadian Regionalism,making people ? nature ?township and wildness with her own experience,in order to make the stories more dynamic and mastery.These reflects her outstanding personal writing skills,makes she received praise as a regional literature writer.All these researches have enhanced the readers understanding of the stories.Chapter Three is about the narrative art of fiction.It includes two aspects: the narrative point of view and the narrative voice.Her stories have both traditional and modern forms of fiction,She inherited and carry forward the traditional narrative theory,also using the modern methods of writing.She makes more material into her fiction,by using various and dynamic narrative point of view;she also presents a detailed description of the story characters and plot which makes them more trustworthy.Moreover,this kind of narrative point of view is related to ideological struggles and gender politics.Those were her unique writing features in Canada Contemporary literature.Chapter Four is a discussion of Munro's stories' artistic features in narrative duration.Munro's very flexible use of the traditional chronology,she's also a bold attempt to deal with anti-chronology.This makes her stories showed significant art features of post-modern.The chronology in her fiction means clock time,the antichronology including two aspects: analepsis and prolepsis.It highlights the central idea of the story and arouses intense curiosity of the readers,it demonstrate the author's ability to control the plot of the stories.The spatial form of narrative time in Munro's stories shows insert ? apposition and pause of narrative time.All these treatment weaken the story's temporality,but created a more sense of space.It reflects the author's idea of fiction writing.Meanwhile,Munro put the psychological description of the characters into the plots,so stories becoming more and more thoughtful.Chapter Five talks about the narrative structure of fiction.There are many narrative structure of modern novels in Munro's stories: chains,mesh,collage and China sets box.The author attached great importance to continuity of plot,but often felt not satisfied.Munro always connect the mind activities to expand narrative,or make past and present together and alternately.These stories reflected the sense of powerlessness about the passing of time.The reader's curiosity was highly stimulated by this kind of spatial form,they pay more attention to the role of detail in terms of revealing the truth.The innovative of spatial form in Munro's stories created a more advanced reading pleasure.Chapter Six make a comparative study with Munro and other writers in the same period of Canadian literature: they are Margaret Lawrence and Margaret Atwood.The paper selects the representative works of each writer respectively,in order to find out the similarities and differences between them.Lawrence and Munro are very good at to put their personal life experiences into the fictional setting and the environment,and also the pursuit of women's spiritual pursuit.Because they belong different era,there are different styles in their works: Lawrence emphasizes the self-reliance of women,particularly the economic independence of Canada's first immigrants generation;Munro are more good at women's spiritual exploration,in line with the social reality of contemporary of Canadian material abundance.Their different attitude toward religious also showed that history played a special role in the different stages of the national culture.In addition,the montage techniques of writing in Stone Angel are more modernity than Munro's writing.Margaret and Munro are equally concerned about the women in their stories.They also have many similarities about narrative methods.Atwood's novels are also brilliant,but Munro only good at short stories' writing.Moreover,Atwood put herself into the building among Canadian literature more earlier than Munro,so she became well-known earlier than Munro.Munro's personal writing process is closely attached to the national movement in Canada,so she has more national characteristics than Atwood.