| Arthur Miller,as a great playwright renowned the 20th century theatre over,has ever been the acknowledged leader of contemporary American drama for many years,whose works,in large part,center on the social problems brought about by the development of postwar American capitalism.Death of a Salesman is Miller‘s most frequently anthologized tragedy work and a masterpiece being of far-reaching significance for American theater after the war.The creation period of Death of a Salesman is in the developing span of the capitalist landscape society,thus Miller specifically focuses on the survival and development of those ordinary people who are beset by the urban landscape,tactfully linking the protagonists the Lomans‘tragic fate to the ambient presence of landscapes.Landscape is not only the geometric space of a drama,but the important representation medium of the drama‘s themes.Death of a Salesman is a story of landscapes in which the Lomans are all their life in close touch with such surrounding landscapes as the angular-shaped apartment,the one-dimensional enclosed house and the backyard garden.Given this,the present thesis targets such landscapes,and analyzes the deterrent influences that landscapes,the very visual images of contemporary capitalist production mode,presumably exert on social relationship,family relationship and man-nature relationship in particular.It centers on disclosing the tragic connotations that landscapes represent,thereby interpreting the essential reasons driving to the Lomans‘survival dilemmas and triggering people‘s deep-thinking on the present-day‘s landscape society,with the leg-up given by the theories of literary geography.The present thesis mainly has three parts,namely,the introduction,the body part and the conclusion.The introduction discusses the development opportunity of literary geography and analyzes Miller‘s great attention to the relationship between contemporary urban landscape and human existence,coupled with the narration of the background and main content of Death of a Salesman.The body part consists of four chapters.The first chapter shows a review of the current research of Death of a Salesman at home and abroad with a detailed sorting and classification,along with an introduction of literary geography theory itself,particularly on the theory of landscape and the relationship between man and space.The second chapter discusses the characteristics of the apartment landscape in the play,and analyzes the unreal existence state and materialized social relationship that the characters display especially under the stimulation and influence of the angular-shaped apartment landscape from the perspective of literary geography,thus projecting the tragic connotations that the angular-shaped apartment landscape carries.The third chapter touches upon the characteristics of the house landscape in the play,and then,with the theoretic leg-up of literary geography,explores the distortion of the Lomans‘personality and the alienation of family relationships that the one-dimensional enclosed house landscape（including its external landscape and interior landscape）brings about,thus demonstrating the influence of landscape on family relationship.The fourth chapter focuses upon the characteristics of the backyard garden landscape in the play,then shows the characters‘absolute worship of commerce and building industry and the reductionist man-nature relationship that the barren garden landscape represents,coupled with an exhibition of Willy‘s futile rebellion and amendment of the reductionist man-nature relationship,the materialized social relationship and the alienated family relationship from the respect of Willy‘s admiration of roadside scenery,the recollection of past vision and the replantation of the natural landscape in the backyard garden.The conclusion presents a systematic summary of the whole thesis,which holds that Miller capitalizes on the special style of the apartment landscape,house landscape and backyard garden landscape in the play to represent something tragic for the Lomans,in an attempt to trigger people‘s reflection on the problems incurred by the landscaped American society. |
