The Narrative Of Metamorphosis And The Metamorphosis Of Narrative In British Post-Feminist Fairy Tales

The last century has witnessed a great leap of western feminist movement,and the earlier anti-patriarchal struggling for women’s social and political rights has deepened into a comprehensive cultural and intellectual movement seeking for a thorough expression of women’s views of the world.The shifted concern of the movement propelled the rising and development of feminist literature,which has made an enormous contribution to the advancement of the overall contemporary literature by providing alternative literary perspectives,themes and narratives.As the third wave of women’s liberation swept the Euro-American society during the 1960 s and 1970 s,feminist literature in the West has reached the so-called postfeminist stage.Under the converged impacts of the prevalent post-modern philosophy and post-feminist sexual politics as well as cultural concepts,post-feminist writers retrospected from different perspectives the female writings in the previous period,and thus brought new changes and further innovations to literaty themes and narrative techniques.One of the common features of post-feminist literature is acknowledgedly the recurrence of “metamorphosis” in association with both fairy tale themes and narratives,and unique fairy tale writings turned out a big hit in the post-femminst literary realm,which has shed a new light to the literary fairy tales since its emergence more than three centuries ago.The representation of metamorphosis in post-feminist writings takes root from the ancient metamorphosis myth and can be regarded as a continuity of modern metamorphosis literature blooming at the beginning of the last century.Rather than indicating a Kafka-like depressive isolation and alienation,female writers of today have greatly enriched and deepened the meaning of metamorphosis as a literary theme,and tend to vividly express through such a theme a post-feminist social and cultural consciousness featuring a strong sense of transformation.So far the research of post-feminist fairy tales has taken shape and made much progress in contemporary Anglo-American literary criticism,while similar study in our country appears insufficient and lags behind.Presently,domestic sholars on the whole focus the study of post-feminist literature on novels,and have not yet given much attention to fairy tales or fairy tale texts in novels.Relevant research is therefore still in its infancy qualitatively and quantitatively.On the other hand,quite a few western literary critics have shown their interest in the study of “metamorphosis” in post-feminist fairy tales either in terms of the theme or narrative strategy.Comparatively,of the limited number of researchers on post-feminist fairy tales in our country,few has put “metamorphosis” under discussion,causing an overall incomprehensive interpretation of fairy tales written by contemporary women writers,which awaits to be much improved.The dissertation thus centers on metamorphosis in post-feminist fairy tale writings,analyzing it from the perspective of the subject matter and narrative representations respectively,and elucidating the function,meaning,together with various narrative forms of metamorphosis plots in the fairy tale texts under study.To carry out the research,the dissertation will scrutinize fairy tale writings by three representative contemporary British female writers: Angela Carter,A.S.Byatt and Jeanette Winterson.Varied as they are in writing skills,the three writers are common in involving the concept of transformation in their writing of fairy tales,and at the same time endeavoring to metamorphose its narrative conventions.Fairy tale writings,through their concerted efforts,have shifted from a type of children literature highlighting magic powers to a type of female literature emphasizing a philosophical awareness of metamorphosis.The dissertation will make a comparative study of the three female writers’ postfeminist fairy tale texts through the narrative of metamorphosis and the metamorphosis of narrative,with an attempt to map out the commonality as well as continuity of the thematic and narrative representations of metamorphosis in British post-femminst fairy tales.The dissertation consists in three parts including the introduction,the body and the conclusion.The introduction makes a general statement of the research value and adopted theories,provides a literature review of the relevant study and summarizes the living experiences and major fairy tale writings of the three female writers under discussion.The body of the dissertation is divided into three chapters.The first chapter serves to make a review of the theories and concepts adopted in the research paper to provide a clear academic background for the following textual analysis.It gives an introduction to the notion and historical development of fairy tales,the concept of metamorphosis and metamorphosis-related literature,the relationship between fairy tales and metamorphosis alongside the development of female fairy tales in postfeminist era,thus inducing the two basic terms of the metamorphosis narrative and the narrative of metamorphosis associated with post-feminist fairy tales,which set up the framework of the dissertation.The second chapter examines by close textual analyses the narrative of metamorphosis in post-feminist fairy tale texts written by Angela Carter,A.S.Byatt and Jeanette Winterson,pointing out,on the one hand,the purpose of their common representations of body metamorphosis in association with postfeminist thoughts on body and gender;and on the other hand,the implications of other types of metamorphosis in their fairy tale texts which mirror post-feminist philosophical ideas about the culture and the world.The third chapter studies the contributions to the fairy tale narrative form made by Angela Carter,A.S.Byatt and Jeanette Winterson,disclosing specifically the unconventional narrative techniques adopted in their fairy tale texts in relation to postmodern literature theories and postfeminist narratology.The two chapters above-mentioned attempt to categorize the three female writer’s fairy tale writings and highlight both the commonality and the idiosyncrasy of the thematic and narratological metamorphosis representations in their works,which may hopefully form a basic picture of the general development of British post-feminist fairy tale writings from the late 1970 s onward.With a summary of the general history of Western fairy tale writings,the dissertation comes to the conclusion that British post-feminist fairy tale representations of metamorphosis have played a significant role in the advancement of contemporary fairy tale as well as female writings.Besides,based on the previous textual analysis,which is carried out individually,an integral account of the three writers’ fairy tale representations of metamorphosis is made,illustrating both the peculiarity and commonality of their fairy tale creations,so as to provide a holistic view for the research.The research of British post-feminist fairy tales in this dissertation on the whole aims to enhance the awareness of literary critics in our own country of the significance of female fairy tale writings,adding an effective dimension to the general research of contemporary female literature.