丹尼尔·笛福的《摩尔·弗兰德斯》和托马斯·哈代的《德伯家的苔丝》—从女性主义关怀伦理学角度的解读-英语语言文学专业论文.docx

Shanghai Jiao Shanghai Jiao Tong University M.A. Thesis PAGE PAGE 2 writers like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster began to praise the novel. Virginia Woolf even believed that the novel Moll Flanders can “stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great”2. Since that time, more and more critics have begun to study it from various perspectives and the novel has given rise to a surge of heated discussion. Defoe emphasizes in his Preface to the novel that the novel is meant to convey a serious moral idea: “[T]here is not a wicked action in any part of it, but is first or last rendered unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent” (Daniel Defoe, 1994:3-4). Compared with criticizing the woman Moll’s own demerits, Defoe more values her personal qualities of self-reliance and perseverance and directs his attack against the cruel and unfair society that has made the woman fall. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is known as a famous novelist and poet3. His writing career stretches from the Victorian Age to the modern era. In his early years, he wrote a lot of novels, and was most famous for his Wessex novels, in which he mainly described the tragic and pitiful lives of the tenants in the end of the 19th century and explored some tragic characters struggling against social circumstances. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are the most famous ones. From 1896, Hardy began to turn to poetry writing, most of which was about his love for his first wife Emma. In his whole life, he wrote 918 poems, published in eight collections. Hardy cherishes human’s emotions, especially the emotion of sympathy. And he argues that care and love should be necessary in people’s relationships, and all living things including human beings, animals and plants should deserve the care and love. Therefore, in his novels,