| Kingsley Amis is regarded as the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century, a dominant force in the writing of the age and the subtlest, supplest English prose stylist of the century. Lucky Jim is his first and best work which made him famous and rich. The novel also won the Maugham Award in 1955. Amis's debut work is deemed as a classic comic novel, a seminal campus novel and one of the key books of the 1950s England. The novel was set in the years following the Second World War and it captured a powerful contemporary mood. It centers on the conflicts of Jim's workplace and his emotion. The penetrating satires bring forth much laughter for readers, and meanwhile, they also leave readers in profound thinking.Without readers'participation, no works can carry its point that the author wants to achieve. The intention of the dissertation is to understand Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim in a different way. Enlightened by the reader-response criticism theory, mainly Iser's opinion, the dissertation intends to make an analysis of reading experience based on Lucky Jim. Reader-response theory emphasizes reading and meaning process more than textual analysis. Iser has claimed that"Reading is not a straightforward linear process, a merely cumulative affair; our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others."The whole dissertation is divided into five parts.The first part is an introduction in which Kinsley Amis and his Lucky Jim are introduced, followed by a literature review of the novel at home and abroad. The reader-response criticism theory is also brought forward in this part, which prepares the way for the following analytical parts.The second part studies three reader-response concepts: blank, negation and narrative strategy. These concepts are put forward by Wolfgang Iser. He claims that when composing literary works, authors would impart some uncertainties and blanks to meanings; during the process of reading, readers will be beckoned and invited to imagine and fulfill the uncertainties and blanks. The dissertation mainly talks about two kinds of blanks, linguistic blank and syntactic blank. As to negation, an author should have penetrating insights and a flowery pen to drag his readers from their stereotyped mindset. This dissertation analyzes three kinds of negation: artistic negation, social atmosphere negation, and comedy and tragedy negation. Narrative strategy is a technique that authors use to prolong aesthetic time and hook readers. There are narrative deferments, staggering of opposite atmosphere, ellipsis and ambiguity.The third part is the character analysis at the textual level. This part adopts Wayne Booth's Implied Author theory. The implied author, who is called"the second author"of the author himself, often strives to provide unknown background, settings and moral judgment to induce readers into sympathy and empathy, which can explain why Jim arouses readers'sympathy while Welch does not.The fourth part analyzes the plot of the text during the reading process. The plot in the novel is like a long thread that is decorated with many events. Those events are arranged in the manner of uncertainty, suspense and surprise. Suspense or uncertainty is used to arouse a sense of tension in readers while surprise fulfills readers'expectations with unexpected pleasure. The suspense-surprise method proves to be extremely effective in the novel.The last part is the conclusion of the whole dissertation. It summarizes the research and also points out the development prospects of reader-response criticism theory.
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