On The Time And Space Form In Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson was one of the early modern novelists in the American literature. He had greatly influenced his students and friends Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner. He was acknowledged as the father of the modern American fiction and mostly known for the modern consciousness he developed in the writing of modern fiction.Winesburg, Ohio, consisting of 25 short stories, creates a group of townspeople who long for love and freedom, but lack communication with each other, and so they are confined by themselves. The first episode named"the book of grotesques"is an explanatory prelude and the other 24 stories from versatile aspects delineate the unusual life experience of the inhabitants in Winesburg. Each episode, with its own beginning and ending, is a complete story, and if combined together, the whole cycle of stories explores systematically the damages by industrialization to the townspeople during the transitional age. Winesburg, Ohio is considered a masterpiece of the twentieth-century American fiction.The forms of time and space are acknowledged as two important concepts in literary theory. According to Bergson's theory of"duration", the form of time contains physical time or clock time and psychological time or we call consciousness time. Moment of insight and stream of consciousness belong to the latter, meanwhile, they are the features of modernism literature. The form of space includes the geographical space, i.e. the continuum in which the literary heroes appear and where the action or conflict takes place, as well as the textual space realized by different narrative skills.This thesis analyses the time and space form in Winesburg, Ohio to advocate that this short fiction collection is a perfect combination of realism and modernism, in that it vividly records the American small-town life at the pre-industrial times and reveals the spiritual world and demonstrates the loneliness, dissimilation and even morbidity of characters. At the same time, with regard to writing strategies and techniques, it contains the characteristics of modernism: the stream of consciousness, moment of insight, juxtaposition and imagery and so on.This thesis falls into four parts: the first is introduction. It makes a brief introduction of Anderson's achievements and comments at home and abroad. At the same time, it mentions, in brief, the research methods and purpose in this thesis.The second examines the time form from the aspects of physical and psychological time Anderson constructs in the novel. The transformation of the small town and the process of George Willard's maturity indicate the change of physical time in Winesburg, Ohio. The second part analyzes the grotesques'permanent pursuit of the truth in the past and the static life at present, as well as the manifestation of their stream of consciousness—inarticulateness.The first part of the third chapter examines the geographical space of Winesburg by comparison with the big and modern cities surrounding around. The second part in this chapter is devoted to the analysis of textual space form and the ways to achieve it from the perspective of the structure of the fiction, happenings juxtaposition, image repetition and time freezing.The last part is conclusion. It is hoped that the study of the time and space world in Winesburg, Ohio may shed fresh light upon our understanding of his craft and his contribution to the development of modernism literature.