Reconstruction Of Feminine Identity In Victorian Age:A New Historicist Study Onangels And Insects

Antonia Sussan Byatt is an English novelist,poet and literary critic,who has written a lot and won the Booker Prize.Her novelAngels ad Insectsbased on the Victorian Age is regarded as the second historical novel created after her work Possession.It is known as the "New Victorian" novel and is considered to be another masterpiece,attracting the attention of literature critics around the world.This thesis aims to use New Historicism as the basis of literary criticism to study social identity and their self-consciousness awakening of Victorian women in Byatt' s Angels and Insects.This thesis is mainly divided into three parts:introduction,the main body of three chapters and conclusionThe introduction briefly introduces Byatt's life and works,the main plots of two novellas,related studies of Angels and Insects both at home and abroad,and the basic structure of the thesis.The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of new historicism,mainly adopting Montrose's "historicity of text" and "textuality of history" theory and Greenblatt's new historicism with the core of subversion and containment theoryChapter Two deeply analyzes the social status of British women in the patriarchal society according to "historicity of text" and "textuality of history".The "historicity of text" mainly demonstrates that the text truly reflects the panoramic view of the British society in the Victorian age and the characteristics of the British women in the 19th century.Through the analysis of heroine in this novel,female consciousness in Victorian age is constantly awakening,and women are breaking through the barriers of patriarchal society and moving from family siege to society.While "textuality of history" is to seek the historical authenticity and deeply explore the women's discourse power through the textual materials,thus showing the reconstruction of female identity in the male-dominated societyChapter Three examines the female discourse from "subversion" and"containment" theory,which shows how women perform subversive behavior in the patriarchal society during the reconstruction of female identity in the Victorian Age,and also reveals how men contain the female identity in the patriarchal society.By analyzing the intertextuality between text and history from new historicism and power discourses,this thesis tries to reveal the development of the female identity reconstruction in Victorian Age,which is of great historical and practical significance for us to understand the historical and realistic continuity and discontinuity on the reconstruction of the British female identity.