Quester:an Important Archetype in Literary History

Archetypal theory is a branch of the 20th century literary theories.Among the many literary archetypes discovered,hero is a very important one,having enjoyed great popularity in literary production and thus been paid much attention to by critics.Quester,as a near-hero archetype,has been neglected consequently.This paper aims to construct as an independent archetype,which possesses the same and even greater importance than hero with the rise of novel.The characteristics of the quester archetype have been generalized herein.Besides,questers in some of the English realistic novels have been studied.