A Study On The "Land Community" In Barbara Kingsolver’s New Century Novels

Barbara Kingsolver is one of the most prestigious writers in contemporary American literary world.Many topics like female gender and identity,religion and race,freedom and human rights,social injustice and human and environment have all become the ones of her concern throughout her oeuvre.Most notably,entering the new century,she pays more attention to the common existential dilemma faced by mankind.She loves to write the life in American southwest towns,as well as the intricate relationships between man and other creatures in nature.By linking the animals and plants in particular regions with the storyline and characterization,her novels exhibit distinctive local characteristics and ethical concerns.Up to now,the academic research on Kingsolver has either focused on one of her works,or the comparative research between one of her novels and a novel of another writer,while few people have made an overall analysis of her works in a certain period.With the help of Leopold’s theory of the land ethic,this paper attempts to analyze Kingsolver’s four novels in the new century—Prodigal Summer(2000),The Lacuna(2009),Flight Behavior(2012),and Unsheltered(2018).Leopold creatively proposed the terminology “land community”,which aims to expand the meaning of community to land and emphasizes the co-relationship between land and all the creatures on it.Based on a close reading of the texts,this thesis will explore two questions: how is the“land community” embodied in Kingsolver’s four novels? What kind of community vision does Kingsolver want to express?The first chapter mainly gives a brief overview of Barbara Kingsolver and her four novels in the new century.At the same time,it summarizes the current research results of Kingsolver by domestic and foreign scholars and points out the regrets or deficiencies in them.This thesis explains the academic feasibility of interpreting Kingsolver’s four novels from the perspective of land ethic,and then analyzes the research questions,basic framework and research significance.The second chapter discusses the relationship between man and land in Kingsolver’s novels.From the two aspects—attachment to the land and loss of the land,this thesis analyzes the characters’ original feelings towards the land in the four novels,as well as Kingsolver’s own thinking about the land and homeland.Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior both tell the story of the mountain town life away from the city.There,local people farm on the land and depend on it generation after generation.Meanwhile,they are forced to lose their land due to economic,political and environmental reasons.Shepherd,the hero in the novel The Lacuna,leads a wandering life.He lives between Spain and the United States many times in his life,but eventually fails to find his home in both countries.In the novel Unsheltered,although Thatcher builds a new family,he is depressed and could not achieve spiritual support and reliance.The third chapter focuses on the interconnected relationship between human beings and nonhuman beings in the four novels.People,animals and plants together constitute the world of Kingsolver’s novels.The friendship between man and animals in Kingsolver’s descriptions is sincere and solid.In the three novels Prodigal Summer,Flight Behavior and Unsheltered,she observes people’s determination and efforts to save endangered species and praises people’s care and love to domestic animals and even the moth and spider in the insect world.The relationship between plants and man,especially the females,is subtle and profound.Lady’s slippers symbolize female vitality,mammoth tree and chestnut are the witness of local history and culture,Nannie fights against pesticides and wins the respect through organic farming.The fourth chapter deals with the ideal human community dynamics in Kingsolver’s novels.From the local to the global,and from the previous generation to the next generation,Kingsolver’s sight has never left human beings.In The Lacuna,although Shepherd does not realize his transnational identity,he has been trying to make friends with different foreigners,and his personal experience is a reflection of countless characters in the torrent of history.In Flight Behavior,the description of migratory monarch butterflies in remote mountain attracts local people’s attention and raises global people’s awareness of climate change.Dellarobia,Thatcher and Lusa not only have advanced scientific thoughts,but also educate and cultivate the next generation to be ecologically conscious.In her novels,Kingsolver places great hopes on human beings,and encourages them to guard their inner faiths and the home Earth.The fifth chapter,firstly,summarizes the basic content of the previous chapters and extracts the core idea of this thesis—the land and all the living beings on it constitute a whole community restraining and influencing each other.Secondly,it makes a comment on Kingsolver’s writing characteristics and concludes them as“connectedness”,“authenticity”,and “humanity”.And in the end,throughout Kingsolver’s oeuvre,it makes objective evaluation of the foresight and enlightenment of the “land community” thought in her new century novels.