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Imbalance and Salvation

Author: ChenYiYing
Tutor: LiuGuoQing
School: Northeast Normal University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Spiritual Ecology Spiritual Imbalance Spiritual Salvation
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 38
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Abstract

Iris Murdoch is one of the most influential female writers in Britain after the Second World War. In the history of British literature, considering her importance and influence, Iris Murdoch to the twentieth century novels is what George Eliot to the nineteenth century novels, and no other contemporary novelists can compare with her. Nowadays, Murdoch is studied a lot, and this thesis analyzes Murdoch’s novels with the spiritual ecological theory based on her 8 novels. Through the analysis, readers can see Iris Murdoch’s deep consideration on the spiritual imbalance of the modern people.According to the spiritual ecological theory and professor Lu Shuyuan’s ideas in his Ecological Research in Literature and Art , the symptoms of modern people’s spiritual imbalance are mainly presented in two ways in Murdoch’s novels: spiritual vacuum and the incapability of human’s behavior. To be more specific,“spiritual vacuum”is manifested in three aspects: the loss of self, the loss of belief, and the meaninglessness in life. The incapability of human’s behavior further includes the helplessness of human’s behavior and the self-imprisonment. The spiritual imbalance makes people’s life out of order, and takes away other people’s lives accidentally during their struggles. People can not face themselves. They can not communicate with either themselves or others, which leads to the alienation of the human existence and the imbalance of the society. There are both personal and social reasons behind this phenomenon, which at the same time are closely connected. Iris Murdoch does not only present the current situation of modern people’s spirit, but also gives her solutions indirectly. With the help of her philosophical work The Sovereignty of Good and her speeches in different universities, the readers can see that the ways to the harmony of people’s spirit are“love”,“good”and“communication”.Murdoch is also a philosopher, so her work is deep in thought, which adds the difficulty to a complete understanding of her works. What’s more, the author of this thesis lacks experiences and few cases which use spiritual ecology analyzing Murdoch’s novels can be taken as a reference, there must be some deficiencies in this thesis, but the author hopes it will be helpful in the later study of Iris Murdoch’s novels from this aspect.

Imbalance and Salvation

Abstract

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