A Study Of Narrative Art In Eleanor Catton's Works

Eleanor Catton is an outstanding representative of the young women writers in contemporary English literature and has stepped into the spotlight of world literature by only two works--The Rehearsal and The Luminaries. Furthermore, she is reported as the most energetic "golden girl" by the media.It is not very long time since The Rehearsal and The Luminaries have been published, so that the research on Eleanor Catton's two novels are not systematic and detailed enough; and most research results focus on the media reports of Catton's winning awards and simple overviews of writing content by some critics. Therefore this thesis, based on the research of The Rehearsal and The Luminaries, is to explore the unique and complicated themes of Catton's two works which are different from the mainstream literature and analyze the artistic characteristics of Catton's two works from the perspective of narrative technique. Moreover, it should be expected that this thesis contributes to enriching the research results of Catton's two novels in terms of narrative art.The thesis firstly gives a summary of literature reviews on Catton's two novels both at home and aboard so as to have a general understanding of the writer and her two novels for the further discussion. Then, it moves on to analyze the literary form and the theme of Catton's two novels. The Rehearsal is considered to be a distinct novel of initiation. However, being different from other initiation stories, Eleanor Catton depicts the rehearsal of youth where all the young people need to experience in a very natural style. As a neo-Victorian novel, the theme of The Luminaries is too complicated to describe from a single perspective and is presented as the colorful luminaries, being just the same as the name of the novel. Lastly, the thesis led by the classical theories of narratology is to explore the narrative art of Catton's two novels from four perspectives--narrative structure, narrator, narrative perspective as well as narrative time. It can be easily found that the narrative art of the two novels is not only the inheritance and development of the tradition, but also entails the disruptive creativeness and uniqueness.