Culture Conflicts And Combination Analysis Of Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter From The Perspective Of Post-Colonialism And The Intercultural Communication

Amy Tan is a famous Chinese American woman writer in American literary circle at present. Her first novel The Joy Luck Club caused an immediate sensation after its publication in 1989. Nowadays, Amy Tan has become one of the representatives of Chinese American writers in the field of American literature because of her extraordinary thoughts expressed in her novels as well as her excellent writing techniques.Her fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, the author turns back to her familiar theme of mother-daughter relationship.The author makes use of mother-daughter relationship artfully to express her attitude towards the cultural communication between Orient and Western countries under the trend of globalization today. However, our literary critical field has not paid enough attention to it.The present thesis is a tentative study of The Bonesetter's Daughter, using post-colonialist theory and intercultural approach with its focus on the major theme of the novel. It includes five chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief overview of the development of Chinese American literature and Amy Tan. Chapter 2 gives a literature review of the study of this novel and introduces the theoretical framework of post-colonialism and intercultural research, meanwhile the writing purpose of this thesis is pointed out. In Chapter 3,the concept of "Other" is applied to the analysis of the novel's major theme, i.e. mother-daughter relationship. This chapter mainly analyzes the causes of the conflicts in the relationships between two pairs of mothers and daughters in the novel. Chapter 4 analyzes how mothers and daughters reconstruct their self-identity and find their common identities which help them to reach reconciliation in their relationship since they are connected closely with each other by their common heritage and family history. The above analysis contributes to the conclusion of this study in Chapter 5,which summarizes the literary value of this novel as well as its implied realistic significance in cultural combination between Chinese and the west.