The Narrating Strategies And Gender Politics In The Historical Books Of The Old Testament

The Historical Books of the Old Testament are great volumes which record the history of the ancient Jews and are strikingly characteristic of narrative styles. However, for quite a long time Western scholarship had not taken them as an independent textual system for narratological studies, and moreover, researchers often neglected the gender consciousness in their narrative forms. Since the 1980's, Western feministic scholars have begun to analyze the narrative form of the Historical Books from gender perspectives, but up to now there is still a lack of a systematized and clarified understanding of gender politics hidden in the narrative form of the Historical Books in academia at home and abroad. Taking the Historical Books as the subject and combining feministic and narratological theories as a methodology, this thesis intends to explore the narrative strategies adopted by the real writer and the implied author, and then to uncover the collusive relationship between the strategies and gender politics, in other words, the idea of patriarchal centrality embodied in the characteristics of the narrative form.This paper is composed of the preface, the text and the conclusion.The preface firstly defines the research object and the theoretical categories. Secondly, the historical and present situation about the narratological study of the Historical Books is reviewed. Thirdly, the research objectives of this paper are put forward clearly.The text part includes two chapters.The first chapter,"the Development of the Narratology Study of the Historical Books", consists of two parts. The first mainly reviews the history of the narrative studies of the Historical Books in terms of classical narratology, and affirms the values of the literary analysis, by the Biblicists applying classical narratology research methods of the Historical Books which are characteristically narrative. It is also pointed out that...