On Ecological Ideas In Daughters Of The Red Land

Ecocriticism emerged in the 1970 s when the global ecological crisis started. As an interdisciplinary and intercultural science, ecocriticism requires human beings to reexamine human culture and to explain the ideological and cultural roots of ecological crises. It advocates human beings to respect nature, to pay attention to natural problems,and to change the human-centered attitude to be nature-centered.Li Yan,an oversea Chinese writer,has created more and more literary works and nowadays more and more scholars are studying Li Yan's works.Her first novel Daughters of the Red Land(Chinese title is?????,literally Red Duckweed)is the focus of study.Daughters of the Red Land is a great chronological novel whose principal axis is describing the main historical events during the time span of 1911 to1988,which lasted over half a century.The real content of this novel is the histories of three heroines:Lao,Qin,Peace(whose name is Lilac in Canada)——two pairs of mother and daughter.Their love and marriages,and their frustrated lives under the historic background are presented as the secondary axis of this novel.For now,the studies on Daughters of the Red Land are mainly about Li Yan's bilingual writing skills,the implications of the title and character's names of the Chinese version—?????,and the bitter fates of females in the novel.This dissertation studies Li Yan's Daughters of the Red Land in two different ways:it studies the original English version rather than the Chinese version;and the study is conducted from the perspective of ecocriticism.The dissertation aims to reexamine the English version of Daughters of the Red Land,analyze Li Yan's attitude about the relationship among human beings,nature and literature,and interpret the ecological ideas and its significance from the lines of the context.This dissertation studies the ecological ideas of Li Yan's English novel Daughters of the Red Land by using methods of literature analysis and case study from three specific angles: ecological holism, anthropocentrism and wilderness ethics. First, this dissertation analyzes the novel from the viewpoint of Ecological Holism. The integrated relationship between human beings and nature in the novel will be elaborated by elucidating the admiration for nature and gifts from nature in the novel. For this process,the three main branches of ecological holism——Land Ethic, Deep Ecology and Natural Value Theory will be used. Second, criticism of humans' overriding animals and other azotic creatures and the bad effects of industrialization in Daughters of the Red Land will be conducted and presented by analyzing a pair of opposite conceptions——anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. An extended theory of non-anthropocentrism——Ethics of Reverence for Life, will be applied to support the analysis of the relationship between humans and nature in the novel. Third, this dissertation analyzes the novel from the viewpoint of wilderness. The conclusion that human came from wilderness and is closely connected with wilderness, which possesses potential values will be drew by analyzing the examples of the values and organic functions of wilderness in Daughters of the Red Land.This dissertation thinks the love and eulogization Li Yan sends through Peace, the main heroine of the novel, have great importance for completing readers' value of ecological holism. Besides, Li Yan leads us to rethink about anthropocentrism thoughts by criticizing humans' bullying other creatures and industrializing behaviours. What's more, Li Yan highlights the ecological meanings wilderness bears for human beings and leads humans to return to wilderness by displaying Peace and Laolao's love for and reliance on wilderness in the novel.This dissertation highlights the ecological enlightenment Li Yan sends through the novel, and makes a confirmation of the values of the ecological ideas in the novel for constructing an ecologically sustainable developing society. This dissertation bears the urgency to develop the value of ecological holism on the earth and to construct an ecologically balanced society to a certain extent.