The Chronotope of Middlemarch:Time, Space and the Image of Man

• Main Authors: Jen-chieh Tsai, 蔡仁傑
• Other Authors: Professor Chao-ming Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96368605664067530648

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 90 === Abstract In Middlemarch, George Eliot manifests her affiliation with the issue of time either in her character portrayals or in her numerous socio-historical allusions. Critics like Sidney Colvin, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Jim Reilly have analyzed the temporal forms in Middlemarch in their own specificity. However, their scope seems to be confined in the category of time. They overlooked factors like place and spatial arrangements that might mediate the understanding of time. Therefore, this thesis sets out to study Eliot's conception of time with a more panoramic view. Bakhtin's idea of chronotope thus serves as a theoretical approach that offsets the insufficiency of the former three critics. He mainly argues that time and space work together to create a specific vision in a certain tempo-spatial environment, that is, chronotope, and thus time and space have to be seen as a matrical whole in the study of literature. As the present thesis shows, this is actually related to Bakhtin's larger scheme in his Toward a Philosophy of the Act. So, following Bakhtin's philosophy of the act, this thesis explores what kinds of tempo-spatial relationships are revealed in Middlemarch. In point of structure, this thesis follows Bakhtin's three major issues--time, space and the image of man--and studies them in three separate chapters.