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    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
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    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
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HOME > Archives > 2023 > Volume 9 Number 6 (Dec. 2023) >
IJLLL 2023 Vol.9(6): 536-541
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.6.466

Spiritual Imbalances of Characters in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge from the Perspective of Spiritual Ecology

Yan Tiaomei* and Sun Yu

Abstract—William Somerset Maugham is a well-known writer and playwright, and he is also among one of the most popular writers in Britain. The Razor’s Edge, published in 1944, is one of his representative novels. Set in Chicago, this novel reflects characters’ spiritual imbalances, i.e., crazy pursuit towards material life, alienated relationships between people and increasingly assimilated life style, featuring historical events like the booming economy in America after the First World War and the Great Depression in 1933. Considering characters’ problematic spiritual world, spiritual ecology could serve as a suitable and effective method to explain this phenomenon. Spiritual ecology mainly investigates people’s spiritual world that will go through many changes in the face of our society’s development. By applying the theory of spiritual ecology, this paper has analyzed characters’ spiritual imbalances in The Razor’s Edge. It is found that characters mainly encounter three kinds of spiritual imbalances: spiritual materialization, existential alienation and assimilation of the life style. The characters’ unhealthy spiritual world reflected in this novel displays Maugham’s reflection towards economic development and people’s imbalanced spiritual world in the face of material abundance. And in the rapidly developing 21st century, we also meet some spiritual dilemma. By interpreting characters’ spiritual imbalance in the novel, this paper hopes to offer some insights to the modern people.

Index Terms—The Razor’s Edge, Maugham, spiritual materialization, existential alienation, assimilation of the life style

The authors are with School of Foreign Studies of Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China.
*Correspondence: sunyu@nwpu.edu.cn (Y.T.)

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Cite:Yan Tiaomei and Sun Yu, "Spiritual Imbalances of Characters in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge from the Perspective of Spiritual Ecology," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 536-541, 2023.

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