论阿诺德·贝内特《老妇谭》中的乡愁主题-英语语言文学专业论文.docxVIP

Engli English Abstract II II Abstract Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) is an outstanding realistic writer in the Edwardian Age. His realistic writing style was criticized and denounced by some critics. The famous modernist writer Virginia Woolf once deliberately wrote an article to rebuke him for “write[ing] of unimportant things […] and spend[ing] immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring”. Bennett’s literary reputation suffered a disastrous decline after that criticism. From 1960s onward, there revived a nostalgic researching trend on Bennett and his works. However, in China, the research on him still lag behind. The fact is that there is none of his masterpieces translated into Chinese. This situation is a great pity in the literary world. As Bennett’s masterpiece among the novels of “Five Towns” serials, The Old Wives’ Tale catches our eyes. It established his status in the British modern literary world. The story mainly develops around the hard and extraordinary life experience of two sisters in the late Victorian Age. We can find that there are many kinds of nostalgic phenomena go through the novel after detailed reading of it. The theory of nostalgia is rich in its meaning and includes two implications: “homesickness” and “reminiscence” when explained from its literal sense. Cultural nostalgia is the understanding of nostalgia in its modern sense, it is the preservation and identification of the disappeared or disappearing conventional living styles, moral customs and social orders. Based on the three understandings of nostalgia, we analyze the nostalgic characteristics of the heroes in The Old Wives’ Tale from the perspectives of time, space and culture in this thesis. Thus we can sense people’s nostalgic feeling and the feeling of identification toward the tradition when facing with the passing of time, the moving of space and the disappearing of traditional culture in the social transitional period.