This thesis explores modernist narrative art embodied in modernist style of constructing narrative space. Within Chatman’s conceptual framework, narrative space can be divided into story-space (settings and characters) and discourse-space (focus of spatial attention). In a corpus-stylistic approach, the structuration of the story-space in The Mill on the Floss, The Good Soldier and To the Lighthouse is examined. The findings show that modernist tendency to deemphasise particularity of place shapes a narrative design of spatial detachment. In consequence, the establishment of settings in early modernist fiction is generally sketchy, but sometimes spatially informative. This is a mixed character. By contrast, settings in classic modernist fiction are symbolic of viewers’ psychological states, a clear manifestation of a modernist interest in characters’ interiority. To further trace the style change from early modernism to high modernism, a cross-disciplinary model for character analysis and a cross-axial model for the examination of discourse-space have been constructed. They help detect some similarities and dissimilarities between early and classic modernist styles of spatialisation. As a whole, this thesis has two features. First, it applies corpus stylistic methods to inform cognitive narratological interpretation. Second, it resorts to visualisation as an attempt at a multi-modal study of narrative space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:541494 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Luo, Jian |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/2979/ |
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