The Study Of The Development And Change Of British Historical Novel As A Genre From The Perspective Of Poetics Of Device

Contemporary British literary field witnesses the revival of the historical novel and almost all of the influential novelists are creating historical novels. However, the research focusing on the British historical novel is relatively scarce in the literary critical circle abroad and at home. It is probably because the flourishing of the contemporary historical writing has caused the obscurity of the genre connotation and led to the scarcity of diachronic study of the genre. The Russian formalist poetics of device puts emphasis on the evolution of genre from a developmental perspective so that not only the newborn text formed during the evolution of literary genre can be contained, but also the consecutiveness and inheritance of genre conception can be illustrated by regarding device as a whole. Therefore, from the perspective of Russian formalist poetics of device, the present study illustrates the evolution of genre forms typified by British realistic, modernist and postmodernist historical novel combined with ideological trend of western literature and history theories under the sociocultural context. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the theoretical basis, such as the genesis of the British historical novel, the idea of poetics of device and the conventional devices of the historical novel as a genre and so forth. The research draws the common devices from the conventional devices during the evolution of the genre, therefore showing three strands of study:the truth of the history and fiction of art, the significance of epoch and the relationship between the individual and history. The following three chapters discuss respectively the construction, value and subject of the genre from the three strands, which draws a clear evolutionary track of the genre. This dissertation believes that the common devices as the perceptible devices decide the name and nature of the literary genre. However, it is the core device of "credibility" that in fact determines the genre construction and the realization of the social significance.