A Study Of Metafictional Elements In The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark(1918-2006)was a famous post-war English Catholic writer and satirist who had keen insight,extraordinary intelligence and outstanding talent.She created many literary works with rich themes,and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie(1961)is one of them.It tells the story of how a female teacher in her prime influenced her students.Although the novel was finished within just two months,it has been widely appreciated by readers and hailed as the most influential novel of Spark.The novel marks the pinnacle of her writing career and received widespread attention from critics.Due to the high popularity of this novel,many researchers at home and abroad have studied it from various perspectives such as feminism,existentialism,religion and the uncertainty theory of postmodern novels.This thesis aims to explore the metafictional elements in the novel.Metafiction can be regarded as “fiction about fiction”,focusing on the self-reflection and innovation of novels.At the same time,metafictional writers lead readers to reflect on the relationship between fiction and truth by revealing the fictional identity of novels and their nature as artefacts.The thesis argues that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie embodies the characteristics of metafiction from three aspects.The first is the revelation of the fiction creating process.In the novel,the technique of laying bare and the mise en abyme structure are used to make readers notice the author’s existence,thus revealing the novel’s fictionality,and then reveal the fictionality of reality and history.It prompts readers to think about the boundary between reality and fiction.The second characteristic is the innovation of traditional writing techniques.In traditional novels,writers often employ narrative techniques such as linear narrative and fixed narrative perspective to construct stable subjects.While in this novel,Spark adopts the technique of collage,the changes in narrative time and perspective to create a sense of fragmentation and disintegrate the subjectivity of the characters,which makes it difficult for readers to project themselves onto the characters in novels and resonate with them as easily as they do in traditional novels.It responds to the complicated,changeable andfractured social reality of the 20th century.The third one is the critique of the author’s authority.On the one hand,by revealing the author’s anxiety and describing Sandy’s self-consciousness,the novel challenges the author’s authority.It leads people to realize that we are in the world of language and notice the limitations of it.On the other hand,in the girls’ rebellion against Miss Brodie,we can realize the new reader-author relationship advocated by the metafictional writers,namely the reduction of the author’s authority and the emphasis on the importance of readers.This thesis finds Spark’s use of metafictional elements in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie very subtle and unique.She insists on exploring various possibilities for the use of metafictional elements without being too radical in terms of exposing herself and expressing anxieties in her works.In this way,Spark innovates the application of metafiction techniques and demonstrates her unique insight into fiction creation.