The Representation of Women in Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands
| Autor: | Tzu-Wei Su, 蘇子維 |
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| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 97 Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the greatest prose stylists in English literature. As a white male writer, Conrad often arouses many feminist and post-colonial critics'' interest and concern. Two of the most hotly argued issues in recent criticism on Conrad are the questions whether he is fundamentally a sexist or racist. In this thesis, I attempt to deal with this controversial debate on Conrad by exploring his two early Malay adventure novels, Almayer''s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. This thesis is mainly divided into four major parts. In my Introduction, I begin from historical and political perspectives to investigate the subtle relationship between the popularity of adventure fiction in the nineteenth-century England and the growth of the British Empire. From the study, we can find that the nineteenth-century English adventure fiction not only was a kind of popular genre, but also embraced an ideology of empire, which internalized English readers'' racial superiority and gender identity, in order to assert and strengthen the authority of the British Empire''s rule. In Chapters One and Two, I argue that Conrad’s representation of women in his two early Malay novels not only disrupts the ideology of empire in most nineteenth-century English adventure novels, but also reflects the decline of imperialism. At last, from Conrad''s representation of women, I conclude that Conrad should be rehabilitated in his relation to women and the natives because his two early Malay adventure novels not only write about women, but also reflect the colonial issues of the day. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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