《第二十二条军规》黑色幽默溯源英语语言文学专业论文.docxVIP

i i Acknowledgements I avail myself of this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to those who have offered me great help during the course of my writing the thesis. I acknowledge my indebtedness to my supervisor, Associate Professor Qi Tao, whose informative and inspiring teaching interests me into the study of American literature. I am very grateful to him for his gracious instruction, valuable suggestions, and detailed comments. Without his consistent help and careful corrections, the completion of the present thesis would have been impossible. Moreover his academic approach will benefit me much in my future work and study. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to all the other teachers, including Professor Hong Zengliu, Professor Chen Zhengfa, Professor Hua Quankun, Professor Chen Bing and Australian teacher Annette Stewart, whose lectures and courses are enlightening and illuminating and serve as an unfailing source and inspiration in my study. Lastly special thanks go to my husband and my son for their relentless encouragement and support. ii ii Abstract Black humor mirrors the complicated mentality of postwar people who despair of the reality but are powerless to change the situation. Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22 is an outstanding example of black humor novel, whose publication marked the emergence of black humor novel as the mainstream of American literature in the 1960s. Therefore in-depth research of this masterpiece is of special significance in understanding black humor novel and its historical and cultural backgrounds. Existing studies on Catch-22 both home and abroad mainly focus on the characteristics and technical features of black humor embodied in this work. Though some researches deal with the roots of black humor, they are limited to cultural aspect. Based on Freud‘s psychoanalytic theory on humor, the present thesis aims to explore the political, psychological and ideological reasons for Heller‘s black humor and, by so doing, reveal the essence of