解析托尼·莫里森作品《秀拉》和《宠儿》中的大母神原型-英语语言文学专业论文.docxVIP

i i ABSTACT Toni Morrison is one of the great contemporary American female novelists. She is the first black woman to win the Nobile Prize for literature in 1993, because of her remarkable creativity. Her works have drawn a wide range of domestic and foreign readers’ attention. Sula and Beloved are her masterpieces. Sula and Beloved have been studied from various angles since their publication. The rich African myth and legend in the novels have also attracted the attention of critics at home and abroad. The lifelike archetypal characters are deeply rooted in the minds of the readers. Archetypal criticism is an important literary critical school, which was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s and introduced to China in the 1980s. It tries to interpret the images, the narrative structures and character in the literal works from the perspective of archetype. The Great Mother is one of the female archetypes, who characterizes the creative and destructive aspects. Based on the archetype criticism and the theory of the Great Mother, the thesis attempts to analyze the Great Mother archetypes in the novels of Sula and Beloved, compare and explore the two mothers from the positive feature and negative feature of the Great Mother archetype to demonstrate that they embody all the features of the Great Mother. No matter whether they are ―good‖ goddess or ―evil‖ goddess, they represent man’s awe and respect of the Great Mother. Actually, the Great Mother lives the collective unconscious of man which is literarily represented by Eva and Sethe as ii ii these two female characters are not only the spirit of African cultures, but also a part of spiritual heritage of man. This thesis is divided into five parts. The first chapter gives an introduction to Toni Morrison, her representative works and the theory of the Great Mother archetype. The second and the third chapters are the central part of the thesis, exploring the Great Mother characters. Morrison uses delicate writing and poet