A Study On The Gothic Features Of Alice Munro’s Novels

Alice Munro（1931.07.10—）is the master of short stories from Canada,in the writing of reality,Munro pays attention to the emotional life of ordinary people,explores the crux of social problems through details,and reflects multidimensional human problems by virtue of ordinary people’s emotional entanglements.This paper attempts to take Alice Munro and her short stories as the object,to interpret the gothic characteristics in her works,and then explain the deep relationship between Munro’s works and the gothic tradition in Canadian literature system and European and American literature,and analyze the author’s unique gothic characteristics and the interpretation of "dark" in her novels.By studying the gothic features in Munro’s novels,we can further understand the generation process and presentation form of Munro’s creative features,help sort out the specific content of Alice Munro’s series of studies,and further understand the development and current form of Canadian literature.The main content of this paper is divided into four parts,starting from the origin of the gothic features of Munro’s novels,and focusing on the three gothic features of Munro’s novels,to find the practical significance inspired by the gothic features.The introduction,which respectively investigates the basic situation of Munro and her creation as well as the basic characteristics of gothic characteristics,and sorts out the relevant literature of Munro research at domestic and abroad.The first chapter mainly traces the gothic features of Munro’s novels,and analyzes the sources of gothic features in Munro’s novels from three aspects: literary origin,national background and personal experience.The second chapter is the center of this paper,mainly around the three main contents of Munro’s novel gothic characteristics,namely female gothic characteristics,Southern Ontario Gothic characteristics and modern gothic characteristics,in-depth analysis.Female gothic characteristics is bearing the weight of the awakening of women’s will and its charges on the existing systems of patriarchy society.The Southern Ontario Gothic character is based on Munro’s personal reality experience to make a field survey of the real life of ordinary people in Canada,to explain the irrationality and alienation of reality caused by multi-level anxiety.Modern gothic features not only embodies Munro’s innovation of gothic narration and gothic text,but also expresses the tendency of contemporary gothic literature to be life oriented.Chapter third discusses the significance of the gothic features of Munro’s novels as the end of this paper,mainly from the social development and human morality of two perspectives.On the basis of summarizing the source and content,this paper explores how Munro depicts the conflict between traditional consciousness and modern consciousness in contemporary society by virtue of the contradiction of gothic characteristics.At the same time,this paper grasp the connection between gothic characteristics and human ethics,and observe how Munro uses gothic to reveal the alienation of human nature and the irrational form of society.As one of the important creative features of Munro’s novels,gothic features are full of Munro’s real life experience and reflect her deep thinking on human nature and social history and culture.A systematic analysis and interpretation of the gothic characteristics of Munro’s novels is not only helpful to grasp Munro’s inheritance of Canadian literary tradition and the systematic influence of British and American literature on her,but also can further explore and summarize the formation process and specific forms of Munro’s writing characteristics.The gothic characteristics of Munro’s novels are related to many diseases of contemporary people,and the study of their gothic characteristics is also paying attention to social ethics and life value.This is helpful to the study of the characteristics of Munro’s works,and more opportunities to further observe the author’s examination of our time and human nature,which has important research significance.