Analysis On The Postmodern Narrative Of Jeanette Winterson’s Novels

As one of the most talented writers of contemporary England, a series of Jeanette Winterson’s works challenge the traditional fiction form with bold narrative strategies, poetic and logical narrative discourses, rich and profound subject implications and striking characteristics of postmodern narrative. Focusing on two of Winterson’s representative novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Sexing the Cherry (1989), this thesis attempts to analyze the narrative strategies of these two novels from postmodern perspectives on the basis of intensive reading and relative analysis.This dissertation is composed of six parts.Chapter One is Introduction, which gives a general overview to the life background and works of Jeanette Winterson. It also reviews the current researches on her two novels and on postmodern narrative theory in China and abroad.Chapter Two and Three analyze the postmodern narrative strategies in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which is a semi-autobiographical coming-out of Jeanette Winterson. Chapter Two explores the embedded narrative structure of this novel and profoundly interprets two fairy tales embedded in the female protagonist’s Bildungsroman; while Chapter Three examines the intertextual references with the Bible and the Arthurian Legend. Through the utilization of embedded narrative structure and intertextuality, Winterson blends the protagonist’s Bildungsroman with the Bible, the Arthurian Legend, fables and fairy tales, dramatically constructs a coherent identity and thereby accomplishes the target of knowing one’s selfhood from multiple angles.Chapter Four and Five provide a postmodern interpretation on the narrative strategies of Sexing the Cherry. Chapter Four of "Sexing the Cherry as a Historiographic Metafiction" consist of two parts. First, it analyzes the dual-time narrative frame and two pairs of narrators involved in each narrative level in detail. The correspondence of these two pairs in different space-time illuminates that the attributes of identity and psychology may be presented beyond the boundaries of time and space. Secondly, the story-telling of the narrators in seventeenth century deconstructs and reconstructs of English History and illustrates the characteristics of historiographic metafiction, of which it is hard to distinguish the reality from fantasies, and to define the boundary between history and fiction. Chapter Five interprets the parody rewriting of a poem, a fairy tale and an ancient Greek myth in Sexing the Cherry.Chapter Six is conclusion. In this part, this thesis indicates that the postmodern narrative strategies used by Jeanette Winterson in her two novels, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry help the writer intensify her narrative power. Taking narrative strategies as one of the means of identity-building of female subjectivity, Winterson subverts the dualistic and linear narrative frame with multi-dimensional structure and multi-angle point of view in the novels. Meanwhile, organically melting the gender view into her narrative consciousness, Winterson constructs female selfhood of characteristics with subversive narrative language, expresses her unconventional awareness of feministic subjectivity in an open female space, and provides a useful experience for the reconstruction of feminism in the postmodern context.