往届英语专业毕业论文范文

A Research into the Construction of Englishness in Bleak House by Liu Yiyan A thesis presented to the College of Foreign Languages of Zhejiang University of Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts May 2013 Advisor Zhang San i Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Professor Luo Jieying my supervisor for her constant encouragement and guidance She has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis Without her consistent and illuminating instruction this thesis could not have reached its present form Second I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my teachers who help me to develop the fundamental and essential academic competence I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis Last but not least I d like to thank all the people who had helped me and thank the help and support from college ii Abstract Recently Englishness has been an important and hot subject of debate in the western literary criticism Englishness is the identity of British own nation and the process to delimitate their own estates English novel as the significant literary carrier of Englishness is turned into the significant research field of Englishness unquestionably The United Kingdom is a mighty state in the Victorian age when Englishness is presented prominently Bleak House is one of the novels written by Charles Dickens in his peak stage This novel describes the lives of different classes under the new industrial revolution in the middle of the Victorian age And in this novel there is deliberate contrast between city and countryside This thesis interprets the construction of Englishness through the visual description of house idyllic landscape as well as the street and buildings in London in the novel Bleak House Key words Englishness national identity house countryside London iii 内容摘要内容摘要 近年来 英国性 成为西方评论界的一个重要主题 所谓英国性即英国人 自己对本民族的理解和认可 是自我身份的界定过程 作为 英国性 重要载 体的英国小说自然是 英国性 研究的重要领域 维多利亚时期是英国最强盛 的时期 英国性在这一阶段得到突出体现 小说 荒凉山庄 是查尔斯 狄更 斯在其创作最繁荣时期的重要小说之一 描写了维多利亚时期工业革命下英国 不同阶级的生活状态 其中描绘的城市与乡村有着一个鲜明的对比 本论文欲 从小说 荒凉山庄 中山庄及乡村景色和伦敦街道及建筑等的视觉性描写画面 解读英国性的构建问题 关键词关键词 英国性 民族认同 山庄 乡村 伦敦 iv Contents I Introduction 1 1 1 An Introduction to Bleak House and the Englishness in Victorian Age 1 1 2 The Studies of Englishness heretofore 2 II The Country House and Englishness 4 2 1The Vigorous Perseveration of the English Country House 5 2 2 Englishness and the English Countryside 7 2 2 1 Anticipation to the Traditional Countryside 7 2 2 2 The Tendency of Englishness Loss in Countryside 9 III The Portrait of the City and Englishness 10 3 1 The Downfall of the buildings in London 10 3 2 The Urge to Keep the Traditional Englishness in the City 12 V Conclusion 13 References 14 I Introduction 1 1 An Introduction to Bleak House and the Englishness in Victorian Age Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens published in 20 monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853 It is the first of Dickens great panoramic novels and it is as much a modern as a Victorian work in its embodiment of a contradiction in our thinking about society and the individual It is held to be one of Dickens finest novels and in none of Dickens novels is the effect of division and discontinuity more pervasive than that in Bleak House with its double plot double time scheme and double narrative conducted by two separate narrators with markedly different voices perspectives and value systems particularly as Dickens avoids all the obvious ways of conferring symmetry on the divisions At the novel s core is long running litigation in England s Court of Chancery Jarndyce v s Jarndyce which has far reaching consequences for all involved This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills The litigation which already has consumed years and between 60 000 and 70 000 in court costs is emblematic of the failure of Chancery His harsh characterization of the slow arcane Chancery law process gave memorable form to pre existing widespread frustration with the system Besides in Bleak House as a panoramic novel are there amount of description about the countryside city the houses and the lives of different classes to show the social presence in Victorian age which will be the main vehicle in this thesis to explore the construction of Englishness in Bleak House This thesis mainly researches the Englishness in Victorian age in Bleak House which Dickens revealed intentionally or unintentionally This thesis tries to delve into the corners of English life in Bleak House and it proceeds from the assumption that a definition of Englishness is not insular or unitary The concept of Englishness is not a quantitative one but a relative one which keeps firmly in the variations in the history With the industrial revolution Victorian age sees the development of cities the innovation in technology and the corresponding changes in life as well as the powerful empire the empire on which the sun never sets In this period Englishness is complex and specifically regional It can be divided into two sides the Southern and Northern of Englishness with the Southern standing for order and tradition and defined as romantic illogical muddled divinely lucky Anglican aristocratic traditional frivolous and the Northern projecting a nation which is pragmatic empirical calculating Puritan bourgeois enterprising adventurous scientific serious and believes in struggle Matless 1998 17 The two sides seem opposite and contradictory however they actually fuse together in confliction English want to find a balance among all the above so they have to compromise in the process to construct a more complex and diversified new Englishness This thesis analyses the Englishness in Victorian age that English swing from the tradition to modern from inheritance to reform through the novel Bleak House Charles Dickens or Britain is neither willing to give up their tradition and history nor willing to miss the chance to develop the industry economic society and national power Therefore English compromise with the two sides to form the Englishness in Victorian age 1 2 The Studies of Englishness heretofore What is Englishness The question has already been explored in the past by a wealth of studies but it continues to fascinate and to provoke thought It is now acknowledged that the definition anyone gives of Englishness depends on his or her own nationality whether it is endogenous or exogenous the definition will necessarily be very different The fact is that the English have always been reluctant to provide their definition of Englishness However it is in fact very difficult to place the advent of Englishness as a feeling of nationalistic belongings and Englishness was indeed not just a cultural and a religious phenomenon but also a fact of social and economic culture There are indeed many ways of defining Englishness the essentialists are in search of a common and stable identity Kate Fox a social anthropologist acknowledges that her aim was to Identify the commonalities in rules governing English behavior the unofficial codes of conduct that cut across class age sex region subcultures and other social boundaries By looking beyond the ethnographic dazzle of superficial differences I found that Women s Institute members and bikers and other groups all behave in accordance with the same unwritten rules rules that identify our national identity and character Fox 2004 2 Fox mainly focus on the same unwritten rules governing English behavior which is a view from the domestic perspective She also maintains with George Orwell that this identity is continuous it stretches into the future and the past there is something in it that persists Fox provides us a grammar of English behavior The problem with Orwell s famous description of old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays smoky towns and winding roads green fields and red pillar boxes Orwell 1970 74 75 is that it could have applied to any nation within the United Kingdom It is indeed shared in the sense that is has also become stereotypical The same goes for John Betjeman s definition For me England stands for oil lit churches Women s Institutes modest village inns arguments about cow parsley on the altar the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons local newspapers local auction branch line trains light railways leaning on gates and looking across fields Paxman 2009 151 Although some of these features are still valid as hallmarks of Englishness they are mostly redolent of the kind of nostalgia expressed by Blake in Jerusalem nostalgia for an immutable pastoral England Nostalgia may well be a permanent characteristic of the English people and indeed Ackroyd sees it as a national mood pervading the music of Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar with the Victorian Age in particular a period of unremitting nostalgia Krishan Kumar contends that all that the English can really call upon is the highly selective partly nostalgic and backward looking version of cultural Englishness elaborated in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next Kumar 2003 269 And Jeremy Paxman defines the English as a people marching backwards into the future It ensues from this that the English look for permanence through change and this is perhaps one of the main paradoxes of Englishness it is both permanent and ever changing continuous and transient fixed and flexible As paradoxical as it may appear the fact is that traditions look both backwards and forwards Q D Leavis assumption that a live tradition must obviously contain both continuity and innovation Leavis 1983 303 has been taken up again more recently by Eric Hobsbawm who refers to traditions that were invented specifically in fact for political reasons to fit modern times And the cross fertilization between historiography political social cultural and literary studies allows for the emergence of a composite image of Englishness as both a reality and an imagined representation Echoes and correspondences between the different articles show not only that the art of any country is an exact exponent of its ethical life Ruskin 1870 39 but also that landscape and literature have much to say to each other or politics to music and vice versa Clearly Human Geography Cultural and Literary studies and the new Cultural History have gone interdisciplinary If geography looks at literature spatial practices are part of cultural studies Recently years have brought excellent detailed studies of issues of landscape and Englishness in relation to painting literature photography and the country house which arise a debate on the cultural effects of ruralism nostalgia and a concern for heritage For some these are symptoms of cultural health denoting a continuing concern for nature for place for roots for others they signal only cultural decline a country unable to face up to the modern world Such arguments tend to assume that the rural the natural and the historical are at odds with the modern This thesis will research the construction of Englishness in Charles Dickens Bleak House mainly through the landscape the rural and the modern city II The Country House and Englishness 2 1 The Vigorous Perseveration of the English Country House The English country house has an elitist power though it has been weakening in face of the devastation of the rural economy and the growing hostility toward the aristocracy The new industrial revolution brings the U K the prosperity of the industrial economy while the agriculture begins to lose his dominance The unprecedented heritage appeals led a large of formerly fertile fields to be changed into the stretches of barren land and a large of once wonderful accommodations look bleak All of above are presented in the novel Bleak House The strong desire of Charles Dickens to preserve the past as the foundation of individual and collective identity is implied in the country house 此处删除多段 The similar vigorous perseveration can be seen in Richard Carstone who is deeply involved in the Jarndyce suit His insistence and crazy about the heritage reflect the importance of the heritage from the family including the houses to him from a side as the houses are considered as the symbol of estate and prestige and are the achievement of several generations care 陈景行 2011 327 Involved in the case Richard changed much that he is no longer energetic and healthy but spiritless and tallow faced Mr Woodcourt found him in a dull room fadedly furnished much as I had found him in his barrack room but a little while before except that he was not writing but was sitting with a book before him from which his eyes and thoughts were far astray Dickens 1993 586 In order to inherit property Richard pays dearly as he not only spends all his money sells his military rank and even uses Ada Clare s property but also his health and life However Richard never gives up his pursuit to the heritage Even on his deathbed Richard is asking when shall I go from this place to that pleasant country where the old times are when shall I go Dickens 1993 734 The pursuit of Richard to the case of Jarndyce v s Jarndyce is precisely the pursuit of the English which is the process of identifying themselves in the new industrial era The tragic result of Richard reveals the frustration and helpless of Dickens Dickens struggled to inherit and keep the tradition or old culture and style however all of his striving seems unavailing just like Richard the heritage has been spent up in the judicial proceedings So Dickens has to compromise to the reality to accept and adapt himself to the modern life and mindset with nostalgia for the past 2 2 Englishness and the English countryside In the speech delivered on May 6 1924 on the meanings of Englishness Stanley Baldwin the former British prime minister mentioned the honorable nature of the Englishman For the home loving prime minister the love for England was closely related to an inborn love for home and garden in the English countryside nothing can be more touching than to see how the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have their bits of garden if they can will go to the garden if they can to look at something they never seen as children but which their ancestors knew and loved Baldwin 1926 8 He considered the English countryside the symbol of Englishness and also believed that it s a kind of ideal home 2 2 1 Anticipation to the Traditional Countryside In the mind of Charles Dickens country should remain the traditional landscape of country while the city should keep his urbanism This idea is same with what David Matless supported Let Urbanism prevail and preponderate in the town and let the country remain rural Matless 1998 32 They reach a consensus that the distinction should be kept clear rather than hermaphrodites So every time Dickens put his pen into the countryside life and the idyllic scenery his tone will be leisure free and easy In Bleak House Dickens shows and describes the countryside mainly through the eye of Estber Summerson And much of his description expresses idyllic life of yearning and pursuit which actually is a kind of romanticism in Englishness They enjoy themselves in the countryside life and live a natural simple peaceful and leisurely life Even Dickens animal has a free and wild life There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at Chesney Wold The horses may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions and may be better artists at them than the grooms The old roan so famous for cross country work turning his large eyeball to the grated window near his rack may remember the fresh leaves that glisten there at other times and the scents that stream in and may have a fine run with the bounds Dickens 1993 72 此处删除多段 In Bleak House Dickens also expresses his affection to the countryside landscape by Estber Summerson s sickened eyes When Estber Summerson just recovers from a dangerous illness and recuperate in the countryside she totally immerse in the pastoral scenes It was delightful weather The green corn waved so beautifully the larks sung so joyfully the hedges were so full of wild flowers the trees were so thickly out in leaf the bean fields with a light wind blowing over them filled the air with such a delicious fragrance Dickens 1993 212 These pastoral scenes are delectable and relaxing however it s not the choice of Dickens but the model which is the inevitable choice of English novel The green corn larks hedges as well as the greenwood are all the symbol of the traditional country life 姜士昌 2008 206 In the eye of Estber Summerson the all above appeared in the country are very harmonious and have the magic power of nature and humanity On everything house garden terrace green slopes water old oaks fern moss woods again and far away across the openings in the prospect to the distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom upon it there seemed to be such undisturbed repose Dickens 1993 214 All of above express the beauty and charming of country which attract not only Estber Summerson and Ada but Dickens and all the English people And the landscape resonates with Englishman and further stimulates their desire to remain the landscape in the countryside It s the most touching thing to see the countryside landscape for generations 2 2 2 The Tendency of Englishness Loss in Countryside The industrial revolution brings great changes in England both country and city For the country enclosure movement lead to the loss of rural labor force and the lawsuit of inheritance lead to the shelving of farmland both of which result in the farmland going out of cultivation At this time economic and industrial changes increasingly divo