A Thematic Study On The Western Sea Novels

The sea, one of the important regions of the Westerners, has become the common subject and theme in the Western literature. Sea literature as an important type of Western literature makes the ocean as a background or the narrative object, or reflects the relationship among ocean and human by describing shipping and island life. Western sea literature consisting of numerous outstanding works, distinctive artistic characteristics, a wide range of literary influence, has a long historical tradition and profound cultural significance. Western sea novel occupies a prominent place in Western literature; to some extent, it represents the highest level of the western sea literature.This thesis, applying thematology methods, extracts from Western best-known sea novels the six themes, respectively,"conquest","growth""freedom","isolation","salvation" and "ecology", and then analyses each of them in the six corresponding chapters. It focuses on more than a dozen works, such as Defoe’s"Robinson Crusoe", Hugo’s "The Toilers of the Sea", Melville’s "Moby Dick", Jack London’s "The Sea Wolf Joseph Conrad’s "The Shadow Line" and Hemingway’s "The Old Man and the Sea". The study purpose is to review the outlook of the Western sea novel, reveal the emotional and cognitive styles of the Western Writers and discover the geographical characteristics, the life ways and spiritual values of Western world. Finally, the thesis explores the connection of the six themes and points out that the themes not only reflect Westerners’self-consciousness but also provide positive revelation for the sustainable development of human civilization.This thesis on the Western sea literature bv the method of thematology is a hard test to my study in the field of Western literature and culture. I take the challenge in the hope that my research may offer some benefit to our Western literature study, and set some basic work for the further research.