On The Vagrancy In Homecoming: Form, Connotation And Significance

This thesis takes the novel Homecoming, the first published book of Cynthia Voigt, an American writer of Young Adult Literature, as research object. Through reading Homecoming and analyzing the existing research on this novel at home and abroad, the author presents the following questions: How does Voigt present the form of vagrancy in Homecoming? What are the social connotations of vagrancy? What’s the significance of vagrancy in theme and story model? By the method of close reading and social-historical criticism, this thesis explores the form, connotation and significance of the vagrancy in Homecoming, and comes to the conclusion that the vagrancy in this novel exposes the social condition at that time and living plight of women in patriarchal society, and being a picaresque novel in broad sense, Homecoming inherits and breaks through the features of traditional picaresque novel represented by Lazarillo de Tormes.This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is introduction which includes three sections. The first section is a brief introduction to Cynthia Voigt and Homecoming. The second section is the literature review of Homecoming. The third section is a brief summary of vagrancy in literature. The second part is the main body of this paper, and it includes three chapters. The first chapter is the classification of the form of vagrancy in Homecoming, including living vagrancy and spiritual vagrancy. The second chapter is analysis of the social connotation of vagrancy in Homecoming through the description of worldly existence and living plight of women. The third chapter is the discussion of the significance of vagrancy in Homecoming in deepening initiation theme and embodying and breaking through of traditional picaresque novel. The third part is conclusion, with a concise summary of this thesis and a final comment on the novel.