| Susan Sontag, who is famous for her critical collection of the essays Against Interpretation, was active in American literary area as a critic, public intellectual and writer in the20th century. However, her identity as a novelist cannot be ignored. Her first novel The Benefactor was published in1963. It received great critical acclaim, especially from the New York leading critic Hannah Arendt. Sontag’s second novel Death Kit established her status as an avant-garde novelist. Her identity as a novelist and critic is closely connected. And her novels are the production of her cultural reflection and criticism. In1992, her third novel The Volcano Lover:A Romance was published and regarded as a work that turns to the realism. Based on the background of turbulent Europe in the period of French Revolution, the novel tells the love story among the Cavaliere, the English ambassador of Naples, his second wife Emma and the hero in the English Admiralty. In this novel, Susan Sontag also described the decay of Naples Dynasty, political negotiations of the Bourbon dynasty, Habsburg dynasty, and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the grumpiness and arrogant of the alliance who are Francophobe.Obviously, it’s a historical novel which the traditional historic critics define as a kind of objective reality. They always try to discuss the cause, procedures and results of one historic event and to represent the author’s original intention, world outlook and cultural background of that time. However, the new-historicism emphasizes the discontinuity of history and insists on the actual struggle while opposing to the historical utopia. It also rejects historical determinism and publicizes the subjective subversions. In The Volcano Lover, Sontag recomposes the love history of the Cavaliere, his second wife and his friend Nelson. The consideration and sensation in her aesthetic ideology are melt into the creation of the novel. At the same time, Sontag rewrites the history about French Revolution and shows a multi-dimensional history from the perspective of different characters. From the perspective of new historicism, we will try to analyze the multi-level relationships between the writer, the history and the reader trough the historical fragments, the marginal figures and Sontag’s multi-voice narrative discourses. Thus, the artistic charm of this novel will be revealed by the combination of history and aestheticism. |
