Spatial Dislocation And Self-exploration In Munro's Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage

Alice Munro,the renowned short-story writer,won the Nobel Prize for Literature in Canadian history.She is adept in digging deep into the profound philosophy hidden in details of everyday life with her unique narrative perspective and keen insight.Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage,her tenth short-story collection,contains nine short but forceful stories covering all the joys and sorrows of the ordinary life.This thesis tries to interpret Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage within the theoretical framework of Soja?s spatial theory.Through detailed textual analysis of the collection,this study illustrates female identity crisis caused by spatial dislocations.It also digs out the multiple causes behind the phenomena of spatial dislocations and discusses the process of female self-exploration in the Thirdspace.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the life of Alice Munro and her main works,and sorts out the relative researches at home and abroad.Some researches on Edward Soja?s spatial theory as well as the significance and the layout of this thesis are presented.Chapter Two mainly surveys the phenomena of spatial dislocation in the First space and spatial dislocations between the First space and the Second space.It also analyzes female identity crisis resulting from spatial dislocations in this collection and reveals characters? desire for salvation.Chapter Three is devoted to digging out the underlying causes for spatial dislocations from the perspective of body space,gender space and geographical space.Chapter Four focuses on the awakening of self-identity and self-exploration,and then analyzes the positive process of female self-identity construction in the Thirdspace.Chapter Five is the conclusion part,and it presents a summary of this thesis.The author concludes that the Thirdspace provides the possibility for women to realize self-exploration.The identity construction in the Thirdspace is an effective way of addressing identity crisis.This collection also expresses Munro?s deep concern on female identity issues and shows her long-term foresight as an author.