A Cross-Culture Study Of The Grod Earth And Little Women

As the first American woman writer who has won the Noble Prize in Literature and contributed a lot to cross-cultural communication between Chinese and American people, Pearl S. Buck couldn’t be neglected in the history of America literature, and even of world literature. Her books reduced Western misunderstandings of China and the Chinese people, in particular the Chinese peasants. One of her most popular novels is The Good Earth, which illustrates a number of Chinese socio-cultural values, such as industry, frugality, courage and optimism.Little Women is a novel written by the well-known American writer Louisa May Alcott based on her own childhood experiences. It shows the March sisters’puritan values. The two sets of cultural values show similarities and differences. Therefore this thesis undertakes to compare the characters’ cultural values as portrayed in the two books.The thesis is divided into four parts. Part one is an introduction which explains the purpose of the research and gives a brief survey of the two books. The second part lists four similarities and four differences found in the value systems of the two nations. The third part tries to provide reasons for the similarities and differences. And the final part is the conclusion, which summarizes the major findings and puts forward some suggestions for future research work in this area.