W.P.キンセラの研究－「シューレス・ジョー」における夢と現実－

Abstract

“Baseball novels”occupy not a little important place in the world of modern American literature. And W. P. Kinsella, a Canadian novelist, is one of the most wellknown writers of that genre. His most famous masterpiece is Shoeless Joe which is the story of Joseph Jefferson Jackson, a very legendary but tragic baseball player of Chicago White Sox. In this novel Kinsella tries to describe his very nostalgic dream through the small baseball stadium which Ray Kinsella（the author’s alter ego）has built in his corn field where the phantoms of Shoeless Joe, his colleagues and Moonlight Graham and Ray’s father, etc., play baseball games. This paper is to make it clear that W. P. Kinsella has looked for the classical heroism and idealism, recollection of the brilliant and sentimental past, mutual understanding and friendship among people through the analysis of the plot of Shoeless Joe and the examination of the theme of it.