Chapter 1 Introduction
Charlotte Smith, a prolific poet and novelist in the 18th century, is regarded as aforerunner of British Romanticism because of her contribution in reviving sonnets andpushing forward the upsurge of Gothic novel creation, exerting profound and far-reachinginfluences on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Dickens and other literary figures. Her longpoem The Emigrants perfectly presents her talent for mastering artistic skills, her creationthoughts and political envisions, and draws wide applause from different levels of readers.
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1.1 Research background
Charlotte Smith is a prolific novelist and poet, who writes Emmeline (1788),Desmond (1792), The Banished Man (1794), The Young Philosopher (1798) and othergreat novels, and three collections of poems, Elegiac Sonnets (1784), The Emigrants(1793) and Beachy Head (1807). These works not only revive sonnets but also pushforward the upsurge of Gothic novel creation, hence she is considered as a forerunner ofBritish Romanticism. However, because of various reasons, she was ignored for anextremely long time. Fortunately, with contemporary canonization of female poets andnovelists, Charlotte Smith receives more and more attention from scholars at home andabroad since the 21st century.Her The Emigrants sets the French Revolution as its background and shapes twocategories of characters: French emigrants and speaker “I”. Speaker “I” bears so manysimilarities to Smith that many scholars contend the speaker as her self-portrait.Meanwhile, it is also widely acknowledged that French emigrants reflect the living state ofSmith, for both of them occupy low status. However, these studies rarely explore the stateof the marginal persons sufficiently: identity of the speaker is complicated, yet manycritics simply view the speaker as a self-portrait of Charlotte Smith; besides, scholarsrarely expose similarities between Charlotte Smith and French emigrants, not to mentionthe study of marginal state sharing by both Charlotte Smith and French emigrants. Based on the research status, the
thesis attempts to analyze the images of the poem’s marginalpersons to explore Charlotte Smith’s meditations on the fate of marginal persons in Britainafter the French Revolution, in the light of Weisberger’s Marginal Man Theory.
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1.2 Thesis structure
The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 mainly introduces research backgroundand the thesis structure, namely Charlotte Smith’s literary career and her writing contextof the long poem The Emigrants, Marginal Man Theory, research questions and researchsignificance.Chapter 2 reviews previous studies at home and abroad on Charlotte Smith’s worksfrom three aspects: writing characteristics, self-portraits and political views reflected inher works.Chapter 3 combs the development process of Marginal Man Theory, defines marginalpersons’ living states, mental states, and their possible directions for solving marginalityand achieving redemption, and illustrates the application of Marginal Man Theory inliterary studies.Chapter 4 analyzes the marginality representations and redemption directions ofFrench emigrants. After the French Revolution, a large number of French clergies andaristocrats exile to Britain and turn into marginal persons in cultural crevices. Their livingstate is under bi-directional oppression from Britain and France, which leads to theirstrong national con
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