MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF UKRAINE
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
Institute of Post-Graduate and Pre-University Education
Faculty of Humanities and Sciences
THE CONCEPTION OF ENGLISHNESS
IN JOHN FOWLESS HISTORIOGRAPHIC NOVEL
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN
Diploma thesis submitted by
the 4th year student of
the group Av-
Speciality English Language and Literature
Supervisor:
Lviv 2016
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ..........3
Chapter 1. REWRITING ENGLISHNESS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORIOGRAPHIC NOVEL.............................7
1.1 Postmodernism and the Notion of Historiographic Metafiction.......8
1.2 English Historiographic Novel of the Late 20th Century.....17
1.3 Englishness, Ideology, and Identity: Debating Conceptions of Britishness and Englishness......22
Chapter 2. ENGLISHNESS: THE CONCEPTION OF ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN JOHN FOWLESS NOVEL THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN .......27
2.1 Lyme Regis: Spatial Construction of Middle-Class Identity in John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman.................................................................31
2.2 Englishness and Britishness: Communal and Individual Identities in The French Lieutenants Woman.....44
2.3 Sarah Woodruff as Challenging Englishness in The French Lieutenants Woman.......................49
CONCLUSIONS ...............61
REFERENCES .................65
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
The topicality of the survey. The phenomenon of Englishness has attracted the interests of scholars in various academic disciplines. A large proportion of the studies on Englishness originate from the field of political, social, cultural, and historical studies. The overall discourse of Englishness and its representations in literature is a huge, multifaceted field of study. A number of different contributions could be written about the topic, and the chosen focus may seem arbitrary on each occasion. The fact that contemporary fiction places significant focus on perceptions of Englishness demonstrates the need to engage with this issue in detail. Despite the plentitude of studies about Englishness which have been undertaken from different disciplinary perspectives, an analysis of novels published at the turn of the millennium according to an interdisciplinary approach and which takes literary and cultural concepts into account allows for new insights to be obtained.
Literary texts are never isolated from the cultural context and from previous narratives. In addition, concepts of national identity are not only represented in literary texts, but also anticipated and formed by them. The idea of challenging concepts of national identity implies that the novels have an effect both on their readers and on the ongoing discussion about Englishness. In 1969, John Fowles publishedThe French Lieutenants Woman. Giving a new insight into the diverse ways of how a concept of Englishness has been challenged in the 20th century, this novel is considered to be a landmark between the old tradition and the new experimental attempts, a bridge between the Victorian and the postmodern world, and one of the most exemplary and influential novels of the 1960s British fiction, which reflects the changes stimulated by postmodern philosophy and view of the world.
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The topicality of this survey is also caused by the absence of systematic researches devoted to the notion of Englishness in Ukrainian literary studies. However, John Fowless novel The French Lieutenants Woman has received considerable attention from Ukrainian literary scholars, to mention O. Levytskas monograph The Contextuality of Chronotope. John Fowless Novel The French Lieutenants Woman (2014) which explicates intertextual connections of the novel with the literature of the Victorian epoch and other intertextual contexts, analyzing the conception of intertextuality on both structural and semantic levels, as well as studies the novel in terms of dialogism conception, O. Kirillovas dissertation Strategies of the Re-signification of Subject (The French Lieutenants Woman by J. Fowles through the Perspective of Lacanian Psycho-analysis) (2005), and Y. Bumburs studyThe Authors Reflection in Literary Work (on the material of John Fowless prose) (2009).
The object of this diploma paper is John Fowless novel The French Lieutenants Woman (1969), which is one of the brightest examples of English postmodern historiographic metafiction.
The subject of the survey is the concept of English national identity and its construction in John Fowless novel, which explores the space between the lived experience and the inherited notion of Englishness.
The aim of this study is to examine the notion Englishness in postmodern historiographic novel, to determine the major features of the concept, and to find out how literature at the time around the millennium, in particular John Fowless novel The French Lieutenants Woman, negotiated, constructed or deconstructed concepts of Englishness.
The aim provides the solution of the following tasks:
to explicit the main principles of postmodern historiographic metafiction;
to observe the best examples of the English historiographic novel of the late 20th century and to define their contribution to the genre development;
to define the difference between the notions Englishness and Britishness;
to represent the conception of Englishness in John Fowless novel The French Lieutenants Woman;
to describe communal and individual identities in The French Lieutenants Woman;
to examine the behaviour of Sarah Woodruff as a typical example of a New Woman, challenging Englishness in John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman.
Major terms and concepts:
Postmodernism is a literary movement of post-1950s, a time marked by the cold war and the excesses of consumption. It differs from Modernism by blurring the conventional boundary between high and low culture, by a completely loosened structure in both time and space, and by multiple openings rather than a closure. It rejects to conform to popular taste and combines heterogeneous elements, making it cater to a more sophisticated readership [17, p. 2].
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Historiographic metafiction is a kind of postmodern novel which rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. Historiographic metafiction is a postmodern genre which bridges the gap between the past and the present, and thus gives a new life to the old forms [38, p. 6].
National identity is understood as a complex of collective attitudes and beliefs that characterize a group of people as a nation [3, p. 32].
Methods of research. Methodology of the given diploma paper consists in the main principles of cultural and sociological studies as well as historical approaches to literature. Additional methods employed for interpreting a literary text are the structural and comparative methods as well as the technique of close reading.
Theoretical basis of research. Productive for this survey are the theoretical conclusions of such contemporary scholars as M. Bradbury [14], L. Hutcheon [38; 39], P. Waugh [59], C. Butler [17], B. McHale [47], which are necessary for the scrupulous research of the development of historiographic metafiction in English.
The practical value of the research is that its results may be applied to the further studies dedicated to the conception of Englishness in postmodern literature.
The structure of the paper is as follows: it consists of an introduction, two chapters, conclusions and a list of references.
The first chapter Rewriting Englishness in Contemporary Historiographic Novel contains three paragraphs. The first paragraph Postmodernism and the Notion of Historiographic Metafiction deals with the new genre of fiction that appeared in postmodern literature and was labelled by L. Hutcheon as historiographic metafiction. The second paragraph English Historiographic Novel of the Late 20th Century overviews the brightest representatives of historiographic tradition in English. It shows the contribution of these writers to the establishment of historiographic novel. The third paragraph Englishness, Ideology, and Identity: Debating Conceptions of Britishness and Englishness manifests the main difference between such notions as Britishness and Englishness and their representation in literature.
The second chapter Englishness: the Conception of English National Identity in John Fowless Novel The French Lieutenants Woman consists of three paragraphs and includes the general overview of notion Englishness, paying particular attention to middle-class identity in the novel. The first paragraph Lyme Regis: Spatial Construction of Middle-Class Identity in John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman represents the portrayal of a conventional and prejudiced Victorian society in Fowless experimental masterpiece and focuses on its main values and beliefs as well as significant issues such as socially and economically oppressed groups, class structure, Victorians vision of womens position in society. Englishness and Britishness: Communal and Individual Identities in The French Lieutenants Woman examines Fowless conceptions of Englishness and Britishness and their fictional representations. The third and the last paragraph, entitled Sarah Woodruff as Challenging Englishness in The French Lieutenants Woman, manifests the conception of a New Woman as represented by the novels protagonist Sarah Woodruff.
Conclusions enclose the generalization of the survey results and summarize the information being observed in the thesis.
Chapter 1.
REWRITING ENGLISHNESS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORIOGRAPHIC NOVEL
The second half of the 20th century marked a new epoch in the historical and cultural development of the world. It was a period of technological breakthrough: the human race travelled into space, walked on the Moon, and invented the first computers. A great number of those events occurred in the sixties, one the most remarkable decades of the 20th century. Malcolm Bradbury admits that the sixties can be understood as a certain ideology with its protests, psychedelic experiences, and utopian expectations. Besides, it was the decade of the sixties when a postmodern kind of mood began to gather in all advanced Western European cultures, when postmodernity began to manifest itself and two sets of changes coincided: cultural changes (the emergence of post-industrialization; increased technologization; expanding consumerism; globalization and the boom in information technologies) with changes in literary and artistic expression.
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The philosophy of postmodernism puts into question a whole range of concepts and assumptions upon which we put order and coherence onto our understanding of the world. The once accepted certainties are interrogated; life suddenly becomes unstable, chaotic and fragmented [39, p. 57-58]. The postmodern era questions and contests all the totalizing narratives offering the explanation of the world and challenges everything that is considered permanent, universal, and thus stable and unchangeable.
The key concept of postmodern theory could be characterized in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, one of the most significant postmodern thinkers, as incredulity toward metanarratives [45, p. 24]. The incredulity, or critique, of metanarratives expresses the disagreement to impose any kind of grand order to unify and totalize the world and our comprehension of it. The fact that postmodernism has declared a war on totality and demands an attack on any claim to universality, singularity and timeless truth explains that one of the central metanarratives both exploited and contested by postmodernism is history. It is only natural that the new, postmodern perception and view of the world would change the status of history and make it a frequently discussed theme in postmodern art.
