A Research Of Maugham’s Novels From Life Aesthetics Perspective

William Somerset Maugham is a famous British novelist and dramatist.His novels have been translated into many languages and loved by many readers all over the world,so he is known as the "master of stories".Maugham’s novels are widely praised by readers,but not recognized by critics for a long time.This typical phenomenon is called "Maugham problem".Traditional critics think that Maugham’s works are lack of ideology and artistry.This paper attempts to explore the philosophy and aesthetics of Maugham’s novels from the perspective of life aesthetics.This paper always pays attention to the relationship between Maugham’s works and life aesthetics,and selects Maugham’s literary essays and some representative novels and short stories for analysis and summary,aiming to extract and sort out the life aesthetics features contained in Maugham’s novels,and then excavate the unique philosophy in Maugham’s novels through the analysis and mining of Maugham’s novel view,characters and themes.This paper is mainly divided into three parts: introduction,body(four chapters),conclusion.The introduction part is to sort out the significance of the topic,research status and research methods of the paper.The first chapter summarizes the development and connotation of life aesthetics,analyzes the philosophy and aesthetic background of Maugham’s novel creation,and puts forward the relationship between Maugham’s creation and life aesthetics.The second chapter examines Maugham’s view of novel from the perspective of life aesthetics,and analyzes the connotation of life aesthetics embodied in Maugham’s view of novel.First,abstracting the novel ontology which pays attention to instinct and the novel criticism which pays attention to psychology from Maugham’s novel view,and discusses the irrational spirit in Maugham’s novel view.In the second part,from Maugham’s original narrative perspective and multiple and unified novel character creation view,it reflects the deconstruction of traditional binary opposition in his novel view.The third part,through the subjective tendency of Maugham’s novel creation and his novel function view,analyzes the high subjectivity in his novel view.The third chapter analyzes Maugham’s novels from the perspective of life aesthetics,and summarizes the life aesthetics performance in Maugham’s novels.This chapter is divided into three parts.The first part starts from the lonely living state of the characters in Maugham’s novels,and divides them into the unknown living loneliness of others and the lonely seeking of the spiritual explorer.The second part starts from the essence of life nihility in Maugham’s novels,and analyzes the existence nihility and cultural nihility in Maugham’s novels.The third part starts from the ideal of freedom of life embodied in Maugham’s novels,and analyzes the two freedom paths Maugham proposed to modern people: asceticism and return to nature.The fourth chapter makes an objective evaluation of Maugham’s novel view and life aesthetics thought in the novel practice,and tries to analyze the cause of "Maugham problem".