Space And The Living Environments Of Man

Frankenstein is the novel written by the British writer Mary Shelley in 1818 and it is considered the world's first science fiction.The novel narrates a story of a young ambitious scientist who carries out scientific research blindly,prompted by his passion for knowledge,and is destroyed by the monster he has created.Doris Lessing was a contemporary British writer.Her novel Ben,in the World is the companion piece of The Fifth Child.The two novels tell the whole story of Ben together.Ben is different from other children.He is rejected in his family and deceived in the society,which shows his hardship of living in the modern society.Frankenstein,The Fifth Child and Ben,in the World are published at different times,while they appear to have similar plots,that is the monster in Frankenstein and Ben in The Fifth Child and Ben,in the world are both creations of human beings,but for various reasons,they are ultimately abandoned by their very creators and cannot be accepted by human society.With the consideration of some of the outstanding features in the three novels,this thesis is intended to investigate some relevant spatial issues embodied in these works.Spatial criticism studies how space expresses ideology,religious concepts,ethics,values,and power relations through representation.Both Shelley and Lessing feature a large number of descriptions of spaces in their works.From the perspective of spatial criticism,this thesis touches upon the changing and changeless aspects in the physical space,social space and mental space of human society over more than one hundred years' time and combs the similar and different social issues reflected in the novels which cause the deterioration of human living environments in the process of development.