Abstract:
Abstract
This study analyses how John Fowles employs the discourse of
epigraphy in his most postmodernist and poststructuralist novel The French
Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Fowles has deliberately used realistic historical
narratives, intertexts and epigraphs, in order to subvert them from within the
very conventions they seek to transgress, and he parades these subversive
techniques and the challenges they pose to the tradition of narratology.
Fowles cites epigraphs from various sources: literature, history, philosophy,
science and even journalism of the 19th-century England in order to wage an
attack against the Victorian and, most importantly, the modern English
society in terms of history and fiction. This paper shows how the epigraphs
echo the intertextual relations of the multiplicity of voices as embodied in the
use of a multifaceted narrator who keeps shifting positions over time and
develops from a covert to an overt voice in the narrative. The epigraphs
reveal the main themes and concerns of the novel and how this narrative
style undermines the tradition of narratology. The epigraphs dramatically
exhibit how Fowles is able to reconstruct the cultural milieu of the Victorian
Age as being vibrant and complex by the representation of aspects of its
philosophical, historical, religious, scientific, economic, political, ideological,
and literary worlds.