Dr. QIN Guibing (秦貴兵)

Title of PhD thesis
Reading Penelope Fitzgerald's "Historical" Novels: Time, Historicality, and Recognition

Short abstract of thesis
For the proposed thesis, Tony argues that temporal distanciation is the productive ground of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels. He reads the main topoi in Fitzgerald's "historical" novels, namely, time, narrated time, historical novel, and recognition of identities. His reading is informed by Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology, in its reorientation of the referential function of the world of a literary work to the world of the reader. Through the act of reading, the reader refigures the dialectic of fictional time and historical time in Fitzgerald's fiction. Ricoeur calls it "narrated time," with its corollaries in narrative identity and recognition.