The Return Of The Author:A Study Of David Lodge’s Biographical Novels

David John Lodge(1935-),famous contemporary British writer and literary critic,has composed 15 novels in the past 60 years.Since the 21st century,Lodge has showed a special preference to life writing which claims two significances for old age writers:on the one hand,writing prolongs the limited life of writers;on the other hand,writing is also an important way for writers to review and reflect on their own literary career.While reading a large number of senior and peer writers’ biographies,autobiographies and memoirs,he continuously writes essays,literary reviews as well as his own memoirs.In his writing,he explores different ways of life writing and expands its boundary.The biographical novels which take literary predecessors of note as the heroes are important works of Lodge’s experiment of life writing.Lodge finished two biographical novels respectively named Author,Author(2004)and A Man of Parts(2011).Author,Author and A Man of Parts have emerged as important works of David Lodge.The literature review shows that there are textual studies of the characters,the content,the motif and so on based on close reading.Some studies focus on theoretical analysis of self-reflexivity,genre,textual features,fictive and non-fictive narrative.Besides,a few studies analyze the rise,history as well as characteristics of contemporary Anglo-American biographical novels in a macro literary perspective.It is worth noting that these two biographical novels take the historical writers as the hero,represent the writer’s life and comment on the writer’s works.The authorial originality,the relationships between the author’s life and work,between peer authors,between the author and the reader,between the author who writes and the author who is written are foregrounded.It follows that the reproduction of the author’s life and literary career is the main content of Lodge’s two novels."Author" is both the title of Author,Author the novel and the common theme of Lodge’s biographical novels.The existing research on the theme of authorship is by no means enough,so we take it as the topic of this thesis.Focusing on author’s life and writing,Lodge’s biographical novels not only highlight the writers of note in the literary history but also embody his view of author.This paper argues that the author returns as a motif in Author,Author and A Man of Parts.Lodge ’s biographical novels are both a respond to the anti-humanistic tendencies of western cultural circles in recent years and a powerful retort and counterattack to the postmodern anti-authorialism such as "the death of the author".The connotations of "author" witness changes in western context.Theories of"anti-authorialism" deny the originality of the author,the association of the author and the work,and defy the "presence" of the author in the work to dismantle the authorial control and interpretation of the work.As a novelist,Lodge does not agree with the"anti-authorialism" view at all.Biographical novels acts as a key medium of demonstrating Lodge’s view of author as well as an important means of defending authorship and refuting "the death of the author".On the one hand,Lodge takes the author as a motif of his biographical novels and profoundly reflects such issues of authorial identity,originality,relationship of author and works and so on.On the other hand,in both the texts and paratexts of the two novels,Lodge uses a variety of novel techniques and expression techniques to lay bare the novelist’s writing process and highlight the authorial control.He intends to prove the "presence" of the author who is still able to guide the reader.Lodge’s biographical novels reclaim the theme of the author,reiterate the authorial control and denounce "the death of the author" in the writing.The author returns in his novels.This dissertation first reviews the evolution of western notions of author,and then studies the motif of author and authorial control in Lodge’s biographical novels.Based on close reading,this dissertation comprehensively uses author theory,genre theory,paratext theory,and theory of meta-fiction.The body part consists of three chapters as follows.The first chapter studies the motif of author in Lodge’s biographical novels.Lodge reproduces not only the heroes of Henry James and H.G.Wells,but also a number of important contemporary writers by reimaging their lives and literary career,reliving the literary and cultural circle of the late 19th and early 20th century in Britain.In his novels,Lodge reclaims the relationship between writer’s life and works,discloses his or her source of inspiration and writing process,emphasizes the originality and subjectivity of the author and highlights the association between the author and the work.The doubling of authors(the author who writes and the author who is written)is the other aspect of the author motif.The two authors have the same literary aspirations,literary career or life experience.To some extent,they mirror each other.Lodge gives us a self-portrait while rebuilding the images of the older authors in the novel.Biographical novels are the means by which the author expresses himself,knows himself,constructs himself and reveals literary demands.The second chapter studies the return of the author in the text of Lodge’s biographical novels.The author controls the genre of biographical novels.Biographical novels are a hybrid of biographies,autobiographies,novels,literary criticism and so on.The author controls how and in which proportions of these genres are mixed and determines the relationship between truth and fiction in the text to achieve a certain kind of balance.It is the authorial control that answers for the different types of contemporary Anglo-American biography novels.The author also controls the text of the novel.Lodge creates a meta-narrative layer by intruding into the text as an author himself.Besides,he writes the "pre-biographic" dialogue of the author with the protagonist into the text of the novel.Authorial control also embodies as the authorial guide to the reader in the text.Lodge employs a variety of ways to guide the readers by providing them with nearly all the necessary information to answer the reader’s questions.Lodge writes "readerly texts" to control readers’reading in the two biographical novels.The third chapter studies the return of the author in the paratexts of Lodge’s biographical novels.The use of various paratexts is a major feature of Lodge’s biographical novels,which is an important medium of showing the author’s"presence" and authorial control around the text.This chapter analyzes authorial control in peritexts of the cover,the title,the dedication,the epigraph,the preface,the author’s acknowledgement as well as epitexts of essays on writing and author interviews.In these paratexts,Lodge voices directly as the author the process of conceiving and writing,his creative idea and method,the theme of the novel,responds to the questioning of the reader and the critic,and defends for himself as well as the raison d’etre of biographical novels.Lodge deftly uses paratexts to express the author’s intention and control the reader’s reading.Lodge controls the paratexts of the two novels so that the text is presented to the reader as much as possible in the author’s intention.In short,biographical novels mark an important turning point in David Lodge’s novels,which reflects his thinking and innovation on the new model of life writing.Lodge’s biographical novels reflect a new trend of contemporary Anglo-American novels.Lodge does not agree with the postmodern views of "anti-authorism".He wrote biographical novels to declare his view of the author:he inherits,sublates and perfects the traditional author-centered ideas.In the biographical novels,Lodge relives the life and creation of the predecessor writers,emphasizing the close relationship between the author and the works.While writing others,he also sketches a self-portrait and highlights the dual author theme of his biographical novels.Meanwhile,Lodge implements the authorial control in the genre,text,paratext of biographical novels to highlight the author "at presence" and refute "the death of the author".Thus,the author successfully returns in Lodge’s biographical novels.