| The celebrated American female writer Ellen Glasgow is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize of 1942.She is a shiny star in American literature by virtue of her depiction of the most real life in Southern America and her vivid portrayal of women characters.Barren Ground is the masterpiece of Glasgow.With the most real postbellum lives of American as its background,this novel reveals the reforming process of American southern agricultural civilization to industrial civilization.It depicts the life story of the heroine Dorinda Oakley who was never satisfied with insipidity,never submitted to the arrangements of fate,and always found ways to promote herself.There is no doubt that the growth of Dorinda as a “New Woman” is one of the most rewarding parts of this novel.“New Women” are a group of special females who arose during the transitional period of 19 th and 20 th century.They are brave and responsible,tough and resourceful.They dare to challenge traditional conventions and values.The unique features and characteristics presented in the novel which differ her from ordinary women in South America display that she is incarnated of the time and age.She belongs to one of the newly born women produced by American reformation who is completely different from traditional woman image in Southern America.Literary works also have their felicity conditions and should be viewed as specific speech acts and can be verified under the theory of speech act.Recently,scholars began to adopt Speech Act Theory to the revealing of the themes and character features in novels and also have made corresponding achievements.This thesis makes full use of the threeway division of performatives proposed by Austin and Searle's five types of speech acts and Indirect Speech Act Theory and makes a linguistic analysis on Barren Ground.Starting with specific individual sentences,the thesis will analyze the attributes and speech act categories and the speaking intentions of the selected texts,based on which the proportion of each speech act will be calculated to find out the structure of the whole paragraph so that in a macro way the speaking intention of the whole paragraph will be presented.However,scholars have not reached a consensus idea on Dorinda's “New Woman” growing path and periods.From above analysis,this thesis concludes that the characteristics of the heroine represent the features of “New Woman” at that age and proclaims that the growing period of Dorinda should be divided into four parts: selfcognition,self-building,self-identifying and self-improving.In addition,the explanatory power of Speech Act Theory in the revealing of the themes and character features is also proved and testified.This thesis will try to solve the following four questions.Firstly,in different life periods,what character features does the heroine possess? Secondly,how are these features presented in her speeches? Thirdly,do the features make her recognized as a “New Woman”? Lastly,what is the growing path of the heroine?In view of above illustration,this thesis applying the core theory of pragmatics,the Speech Act Theory to a case study of the text Barren Ground,is of significance both in theoretical and practical research.On the one hand,it not only enriches the ways and approaches to analyze literal works but also corroborates Speech Act Theory's function in interpreting novels.On the other hand,it broadens the researches of Ellen Glasgow and provides another perspective for the study of heroine's “New Woman” image in Barren Ground and offers a new thought for the division of Dorinda's growing path. |
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