Radical Innocence Carson Mccullers And The Dialogic Imagination

The southern literature takes up a special yet not less important place in the Americanliterature. Known as a genius in the American literature history, Carson McCullerscompleted her first novel of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1939) at the very age oftwenty-three, which was later ranked17thin Random House’s list of100Best EnglishFictions of the20thCentury. Later on, McCullers revisited spiritual loneliness and lack ofcommunication in her follow-up novels of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1940), The Balladof the Sad Cafe (1941), and The Member of the Wedding (1946). Although literary criticismof McCullers covers a broad range of fields including theme discussion, feminism, queerstudies, the grotesque and her roles in the southern literary legacy, seldom does any literaryreview notice the affirmative nature of her texts.The thesis intends to do a dialogic reading of three McCullers novels, The Heart Is aLonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and The Member of the Wedding, investigatedifferent social meanings, and by taking all elements as a whole finally reveal the hidingmessage of affirmation between the lines. Chapter One displays my adaptation of Bahktin’stheory of dialogism and then explores the affirmation in love in The Ballad of the Sad Café.Chapter Two investigates resistance to the convention world of the five characters in TheHeart Is a Lonely Hunter. And Chapter Three seeks to show the strength of belief inFrankie’s painful growth and examines affirmation in comparison and contrast of Frankieand Mick.