Making The Novel Novel

After the middle of the twentieth century, the English literary world is faced with tough choices. English writers struggle between realism and modernism. Traditional realism has rooted in English literature whilst modernism has a significant influence on English writers because of its bold innovations and experiments in form. David Lodge holds that the English novelists linger at the crossroads of the novel, and John Barth even shouts out "the death of the novel." Confronted with doubts about the novel by critics, John Fowles makes some experiments and innovations on the language and techniques of the novel. As an English novelist of the sixties, John Fowles benefits from traditional realism but he brings a new and unique reading experience to the reader by his postmodern writing. Fowles regenerates the stale and familiar Victorian novel by experiments on language, structure and narration of the traditional novel, which exerts a profound impact on the subsequent novelists’writings.This thesis firstly points out that Fowles adopts metalanguage and irony to revive the poetic nature of language in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. On one hand, the unique metalanguage tactfully combines Victorian syntax and dialogue with a foreign language and makes the familiar language new and strange. On the other hand, the ironic language enhances the readability, interestingness and perceptibility of the novel, and provides a fresh aesthetic pleasure to the reader. Secondly, Fowles creates suspense and digression to encrypt the plot of the novel, to tantalize the reader’s reverse psychology and to smash the reader’s habitualization. Suspense can provoke the reader’s strong sense of curiosity and expectation, and make the novel difficult while digression can keep and prolong the expectation, and lengthen the aesthetic process. At last, Fowles employs parody and metafiction to deliberately lay bare the fraudulence and fictionality of conventional realistic narration, so as to make the reader keep some distance from the text, to break the boundary between reality and fiction, and to endow this novel which is set in the Victorian society with features of novelty and postmodernity.The present author analyzes the language, the plot and narrative techniques of Fowles’s representative work The French Lieutenant’s Woman from the perspective of defamiliarization. The analysis of the defamiliarization in the novel sheds new light on Fowles’s attitude towards tradition and innovation, and makes the reader think about the novel form and novel creation.