The Literature Of The World An Intertextual Analysis On The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook is the representative work of Doris Lessing, 2007 Noble Prize winner for Literature. Its publication not only entrenched Lessing's position in literary circle as a great woman writer in the world, but also invited abundant criticism by the critics at home and abroad. Critics have approached this novel by exploring its multiple themes, by probing the significance in psychological field or by decoding the structural and stylistic importance. Only a branch of them gave a glimpse of intertextual relations of the novel. Enlightening as their works are, their researches only touched upon a scrap of intertextual mesh reflected in the novel, thus the intertextual analysis is not systematic and comprehensive.This thesis aims to decipher The Golden Notebook in the light of intertextuality. With the construction of intertextual web in vertical dimension with texts of previous works and in horizontal dimension with social background, this thesis unveils the intertextual liaison of the novel with Sisyphean myth in structural arrangement, the androgyny tradition in thematic exploration and Ulysses in character molding in vertical axis, and uncovers the intertextual interconnectedness with social climate of that time in horizontal axis by presenting the newspapers of war, riot, and arms race in the novel. This intricate web of intertextuality unfolds a vivid picture of physical and spiritual climate of the whole world in the 1950s, helping to reveal the glamour of this book as a"world literature in real sense".