Revisiting the "Chinese Nora": An Intertextual and Narratological Comparison Between A Doll’s House and “Regret for the Past”.

Abstract

This thesis, “Revisiting the ‘Chinese Nora’: An Intertextual and Narratological Comparison between A Doll’s House and ‘Regret for the Past’”, is the very first master-thesis-long work on the comparison between A Doll’s House and “Regret for the Past” in both academic fields of Ibsen Studies and Lu Xun Studies. It starts with an inspection of the intertextuality between the texts and between the texts’ context and moves to analysis, interpretation, and comparison of the structures of the texts from the theoretical lens of narratology. Besides the theory of intertextuality and narrative theory, the thesis conducts a detailed close reading of the texts by which the texts are compared. And the analysis and comparison land on the statement that the two texts, and their female protagonists Nora and the “Chinse Nora” are semantically similar but syntactically much different. And finally, by managing to perform an academic dialogue with both theoretical and analytical works in literary studies, this thesis fills a research gap where a thorough intertextual and structural comparison of A Doll’s House and “Regret for the Past” has never been made before.