Authority Of Narration, Subversion Of Gender

Jeanette Winterson is one of the "most controversial yet innovative" writers in contemporary British literature. From a unique perspective, she depicts the fate of women and shows concern for women's destiny, development and desire, and explores their struggle for freedom. Her works, imbued with particular narrative strategies, poetic language and rewriting of the traditional fairy tales, arrests wide attention from both critics and readers. Feminist narratology is an interdisciplinary literary critical theory, which combines feminism theory with narratology theory. Fictions of Authority is the representative work of feminist narratology, in which Susan S. Lanser makes an elaborate analysis of female writers and the narrative voices. This thesis applies "authorial voice" and "personal voice" to analyse Winterson's two works: Lightshousekeeping, Sexing the Cherry so as to reveal how women achieve authority over men through the two narrative modes.Chapter one is an overall generalization of the development and main characteristics of feminist narratology and the influence of feminism and postmodernism on Winterson. In chapter two, a detailed analysis is made to analyse Winterson's works based on the application of the narrative modes of "authorial voice" and "personal voice" to find out how women achieve authority over men through their voices. In the last chapter, through analysing the appearance, discourse and behaviour of Dog Woman, Winterson succeeds in subverting the gender between female and male.As a postmodern female writer, Jeanette Winterson, through the application of narrative strategy and portrait of the characters in her works, successfully achieves women's authority over men and subversion of gender role.