Dissertation > Excellent graduate degree dissertation topics show

Thematic Significance in Dubliners

Author: HanJing
Tutor: LiLanSheng
School: Central South University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: James Joyce Dubliners Thematic Significance
CLC: I562.074
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2013
Downloads: 22
Quote: 0
Read: Download Dissertation

Abstract

Dubliners, a short story collection written by the famous modern Irish novelist James Joyce, presents some aspects of Dublin’s paralysis: moral, political or spiritual, and can be regarded as a mirror of Dublin life during the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis, by adopting such critical approaches as psychoanalysis, cultural studies and postcolonial studies, and based on a close-reading of Dubliners, attempts to make a systematic study on Dubliners’ thematic significance.Chapter One analyzes the alienation of human nature in Dubliners represented by "An Encounter" and "Counterparts." It analyzes how Joyce reveals in these two stories the Dubliners’perversion of humanity by colonial education and colonial rule, so as to expose Dubliners’’ thematic significance-the alienation of human nature of the Irish.Chapter Two illustrates the paralysis of emotion in Dubliners represented by "Eveline" and "A Little Cloud." It examines how Joyce discloses a girl’s inability of pursuing romance and a middle-aged clerk’s predicament in his married life to reflect the emotional paralysis of the Irish people. Joyce’s vivid portrait of the paralytic emotional symptoms has truly conveyed Dubliners’thematic significance.In Chapter Three, the voidness of spirit is discussed mainly by focusing on "After the Race" and "Two Gallants" in Dubliners. These two stories describe a self-deceptive pursuit of life values and an absurd seeking of success respectively, to reveal the voidness of the Irish spirit. This implication deeply embodies Dubliners’ thematic significance.Chapter Four explores the living death of the Irish nationality embodied by "The Sisters" and "The Dead" in Dubliners. It explores how Joyce portrays a Catholic father’s death haunting the living and a warm but indifferent party shadowing the death of the Irish collective spirit to fully uncover the central thematic significance of Dubliners-the living death of the Irish nationality.This thesis attempts to provide a better understanding of the Irish society before the independence of the Republic of Ireland through the discussion of the multiple themes of Dubliners, which reveal a wide range of mental situations in Ireland during the turn of twentieth century. The thematic reading on this short story collection provides us with an access to the understanding of people’s living conditions and social reality of that historical period and even more thorough understanding of Joyce’s paradoxical emotion of hatred and love to his motherland and its people. Therefore, it is of certain literary and social significance.

Related Dissertations

James Joyce 's early image of the \,I562
The Cracked Gray Looking-Glass,I562
Joyce that side \,I562.074
On the \,I562
\,I562.074
The Illusion of Narrative,J905
Linguistic Deviation in a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Its Reconstruction in Chinese Versions,I562.074
A Narrative Approach to Sympathy in James Joyce’s Dubliners,I561.074
A Study of the Artistic Features of Epiphanies in Dubliners,I562
Paralysed Dubliners,I562
Study of Indeterminacy in James Joyce’s Dubliners,I562
Seek national identity,I562
Ethical Conflicts in the Marital Relation of Ulysses,I562
Joyce ' Dubliners' interpretation of literary ethics,I562.074
Submission and Rebellion: A Study of Female Characters in Dubliners,I562.074
Compare the Sense of Loneliness of Bai Xianyong’s and Joyce’s,I106
What Lies Behind Repetition?,I562
On Reproducing Literary Style of Dubliners in Chinese,H315.9
The Employment of Style in James Joyce’s Dubliners,I562.074
The Moral Paralysis in James Joyce’s Dubliners,I562
The characteristics of modernism "Dubliners",I562