On Loss Of Family Ethics In Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant

Anne Tyler(1941--),one of the most notable contemporary American writers,is renowned for the detailed characterization of family members and the climactic description of familial conflicts.Over the four decades in the last century,she has continually published 15 novels,over 50 short stories and numerous book reviews,among which Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is recognized as the optimal exemplification.Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant tells the interwoven love and hatred among the family members of three generations in Baltimore,a Southern town in the United States of America.In the novel,Pearl,the first generation of the family,was dumped by her husband Beck and had to raise three children alone.Then,the family was composed of an irritable mother,an absent father,an impulsive elder son,an impotent younger son and a changeable daughter,and the loss of family ethics among various groups of characters in the novel thus arose.This novel represents the zenith of Anne Tyler's description of familial relationships,winning her widespread recognition from the critics.She is also rewarded the Pulitzer Prize nomination and a Faulkner Prize finalist.Although many scholars at home and abroad have made research into the novel from multiple perspectives,rarely have scholars studied it from Ethical Literary Criticism perspective.Ethical Literary Criticism is a new literary appreciation approach proposed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao.It combines the traditional Ethical Criticism with literary appreciation,aiming at interpreting the literary phenomena objectively from the characters' perspective.This essay attempts to analyze the loss of family ethics embodied in various groups of characters in the novel,in order to reveal the universal ethical issues and figure out the solutions.This thesis consists of six chapters.A brief introduction about Anne Tyler and her works will be first presented in chapter one.Then,the plot of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as well as the significance and layout of the thesis will also be involved.In the second chapter,Literature Review will deal with the theoretical framework of Ethical Literary Criticism and the current research on Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant at home and abroad.The main body part includes chapter three to five,which will analyze the loss of family ethics among three kinds of familial relationships in detail by employing Ethical Literary Criticism.Chapter six is the conclusion part.It will sum up the thesis by attributing the loss of family ethics in the novel to the betrayal of ethical responsibility of each family member and pointing out a happy and stable family can never exist without sufficient parental love,sibling fraternity as well as marital harmony;the limitations of the research and predictions of future study orientation of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant will also be presented.