An Analysis Of Traumatic Children Images

Through ages, the creation of "children images" has been keenly favored and chosen by writers of all countries. The "bitter childhood novels" flourished in the1940s and1950s which opened the writing precedents of "traumatic children images". Charles Dickens and Mo Yan are both masters of this kind of creations in Britain and in China. Their works delineate the miserable conditions of poor children and expose kinds of unreasonable phenomenon in certain society and daily life. Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Mo Yan’s Transparent Carrot both take children as their spokesmen to express their social consideration and culture reflection. These two works possess many similarities which are worth to be compared and analyzed. The characters images are in particular. Charles Dickens and Mo Yan both create vivid and typical images of traumatic children.Taking use of the parallel comparison, this thesis will study the creation of traumatic children images in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and in Mo Yan’s Transparent Carrot. On the creation origins, this thesis traces the evolvement of children’s identities in British literature and Chinese literature; and explores Dickens’ and Mo Yan’s subjective creating reasons. On textual expression, it compares Dickens’ and Mo Yan’s similar but distinctive traumatic children images by analyzing their set of family environment and parent-child relationship as well as descriptions of characters psychologies and behaviors. On creative art, the author of this thesis appreciates the two writers’ unique design of typical traumatic children’s sensory trauma and language trauma. On the main ideas and themes, this thesis reveals Dickens’ social responsibilities for children protection and social criticism, and Mo Yan’s cultural reflections on the protagonist’s final tragedy. Moreover, the whole thesis has comprehensively and aesthetically appreciated Dickens’ and Mo Yan’s traumatic children images.This thesis hopes to reveal the two writers’ common care of world children’s miserable living conditions and their ideas of social democracy and ideological emancipation through studying and comparing the rules and themes of traumatic children writings by different writers in different cultures. Meanwhile, it hopes to make a contribution to the comparative literature of traumatic children images writings in Britain and in China.