英语论文哪里有？笔者借助后现代主义相关理论，本文探究了戏仿，杂糅和不确定性在后现代历史书写和揭示作品内涵方面所发挥的作用。
Chapter I Introduction
1.1 The Focus of the Study
Julian Barnes, in full Julian Patrick Barnes, pseudonyms Edward Pygge and Dan Kavanagh, British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past.
Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford and got the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968, then he began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Kavanagh pseudonym. These books—which include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987) — feature a man named Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop turned private detective. The first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinize his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the short story “Un Coeur simple.” Barnes’s later novels included A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross Channel (1996). In the satirical England, England (1998), Barnes satirizes modern England in his portrayal of a theme park on the Isle of Wight, completing with the royal family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and pubs. Critic contended Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explored why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur and George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Chapter III Hybridity: The Query of Historical Truth
3.1 Hybridity of Genre
As is discussed in the previous chapter, the work’s formal parody of biography and detective fiction makes it inherently multi-textual. However, the hybridity of genres in this novel goes far beyond what has been discussed above, so this section will discuss the hybridity of genres and its narrative effects in more depth.
3.1.1 As a Double-Biography
As the title of the work suggests, the main plot of Arthur and George revolves around the lives of the two main characters. Their upbringing and life experiences form the main content of the work. Barnes has confessed that “At the beginning I was rather irritated that I was Obliged to write about Arthur Conan Doyle, and then I read about him I found him a much more interesting man than I had imagined, and his career ending as a sort of spiritualist evangelist I found fascinating” (Guignery et al., 2009: 134). And then Barnes changed his mind and used delicate writing to portray the life of the famous detective novelist. Vertically, Barnes recorded the course of Arthur’s life. A childhood yearning for chivalry, a youth wandering around in pursuit of dreams, a middle-aged man who had a successful career and a happy marriage but fell into a spiritual crisis, and an old age who tried his best to explore the true meaning of life. In the work, Arthur’s life begins with death (his grandmother) and ends with death (his own death), forming a complete closed loop. From a horizontal perspective, Barnes has a full characterization of Arthur in each period. There is not only a writing about his own experience, but also a care for his surrounding environment and characters. Therefore, this work can be regarded as a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle because of its three-dimensional modeling of Arthur’s image.
Chapter IV Indeterminacy: The Multiple Possibilities of Historical Interpretation
4.1 Indeterminacy of Plot
The plot of a traditional novel is always coherent and logical in time and space, and the reader can easily surmise from one event to the next. Postmodernist writers reject the logical, coherent and closed nature of the storyline. The indeterminacy of the plot was seen as one of the key elements of creation. They believe that the modernist coherence of meaning, the logic of the characters’ actions and the complete unity of the plot is a closed structure, a wishful imagination of the writers, not based on real life. This closed structure must therefore be broken down and replaced by an open structure full of dislocations.
4.1.1 Non-linear Structure Disordered Time and Space
Arthur and George consists of four chapters: beginning—beginning with an ending—ending with a beginning—ending. On the surface, the content of this work forms a perfect closed-loop structure, in line with the “beginnings—development—climax—endings” pattern of storytelling that is generally followed in novels. However, a closer reading of the text reveals that these chapter headings are merely an obfuscation by the author, and that the content of each chapter does not follow the logical sequence expected by the reader. Alden has summarized this way of writing as trying “to demonstrate what fiction can do with history that history cannot” (Alden, 2009: 59), such as creating atmosphere rather than presenting facts, or breaking up a strict chronology or linear narrative pattern by interspersing varying perspectives. What the reader has to be aware of at all times is that Barnes does not create the version of the past in Arthur and George, but two versions: Arthur’s and George’s.
4.2 Indeterminacy of Theme
In traditional fiction, the theme occupies a supreme position in literary creation. It is the soul of the work, its depth directly determines the value of the work, and it is one of the driving forces behind the writer’s creation. In postmodernist fiction, however, everything is on the same plane, and there is no theme, no “subtopic”, not even a “title”. Postmodernist writers emphasize the randomness, improvisation and patchwork nature of their work, and the importance of the reader’s participation in and creation of the work (Zeng, 2005: 1). Arthur and George is a masterpiece of randomness, improvisation and pastiche. It does not have a consistent theme, and its pervasive content and fragmented structure provide the basis for diverse interpretations by the reader. Racism, the construction of Englishness, the initiation theme, memory and death, and the crisis of belief are all themes that Barnes wants to convey through this work. Barnes explores these themes in order to express Edwardian anxieties that challenge, in particular, the mythical notion of a secure English identity as yet unscathed by two world wars, and his novel thus has important political dimensions. The indeterminacy of the theme provides the reader with a wide scope for reading and adds a plural meaning to the work.
Chapter V Conclusion
Barnes’s literary creation began in the 1970s and 1980s, and after eight years of brewing, he published his first novel Metroland in 1980. British literature was at a crossroads between realism and postmodernism at that time, and both literary and historical ideas were being challenged. Barnes chose the path of postmodernism, and his answer to the question “what is history” must therefore be examined in the context of postmodernism. Barnes’s novels present a fractured, fragmented and multi-dimensional history, full of uncertainties and contradictions, for which he makes extensive use of experimental, postmodern writing techniques, such as parody, collage, hybridization of genres, non-linear multi-perspective narratives and intertextual writing. Arthur and George, first published in 2005, continues Barnes’s consistent focus on history, but because of the authenticity of its content it is often regarded as a return to realism, and the postmodern nature of its writing has not received the attention it deserves. This thesis examines the postmodern features of history writing in Arthur and George in terms of parody, hybridity and indeterminacy. By employing these postmodern writing strategies, Barnes subverts grand history, questions historical truth, and offers more possibilities for the contemporary reading of history.
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