A Road Of Her Own

Katherine Anne Porter is a female American writer who is prestigious worldwide. Actually, she has exerted influences upon people in almost the whole decade of the 20^th century, and tends to influence the next decade continuously. Despite a longer production period when compared with her contemporary writers, she can not be viewed as a polygraph. In the long passage of about 50 years, she presents the reader with no more than 27 novels in total, wherein the great majority falls into short novels, and there is only one river novel. However, possibly due to this, all of Porter's fictions are produced with prudence and precision. In these fictions the carefully-designed structure, scrupulously depicted characters, and rich and real details impress the reader and critics deeply. She herself is thus regarded as a stylist. Meanwhile, her characters are mostly female. Exquisitely, she digs deep into the hearts of these women, who are of different social status, and play different roles in society. A large quantity of lifelike female images is produced in this way. This choice of materials, to a great extent, endows her fictions with the feminism color. Upon aforesaid two bases, in the following thesis I choose to start from the two perspectives. Taking Old Mortality as the example, I conduct an in-depth analysis into this novel in view of two critical theories.The thesis is made up of 5 chapters. The first one consists of three sections, namely a general survey of the overall attributes in Porter's fictions, a review of previous studies, and a brief introduction to Old Mortality. Chapter 2 deals with the theoretical bases, wherein the formation and development of both literary stylistics and feminist criticism are presented. As the main body of the...