| Hybridity in modern literature is characterized by mixing different social, cultural or literary elements to introduce for discussion issues of identity, culture or writing techniques, etc. Since the end of World War II, more and more non-white writers are living in Britain and writing in English. Hybridity is becoming a new feature of literature in the post-colonial era. With the help of theories of Post-colonialism, the thesis aims at exploring cultural hybridity, linguistic hybridity and narrative hybridity in White Teeth by a half-British and half- Jamaican writer -- Zadie Smith.The thesis briefly introduces status quo of research on Zadie Smith's White Teeth. In the second part, the thesis deals with the cultural hybridity in the novel. Since the immigrants arrived in Britain, their own cultures have been in collision with the western culture. In the course of accepting or rejecting the western culture, the immigrants are developing a new culture - a mixture of their own and the western one. This tendency of hybridity can be traced in the immigrants'religious belief, their aesthetic value and educational mode.In the next two parts, the thesis also analysizes the hybridity in terms of two aspects: language varieties and narrative mixture. The author uses dozens of non-standard English, such as Cockney, Jamaican Creole, youth language, which represents different people's need for discourse power. In terms of narrative style, the novel not only displays realistic characteristics, such as detailed description of characters'appearance and psychology; a circle pattern; narration in chronological order; but also modernist characteristics, such as paradox; participatory narrative; free indirect discourse; symbolism.In conclusion, cultural hybridity is becoming an irrevocable tendency and it gives birth to a new hybrid culture which might predict a better future for human beings, while the hybridity in language and narrative undoubtedly ushers in a new era in literature creation. |
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