Marginalization And Discrimination---Struggle And Exploration---Conflicts And Acculturation

Chinese American literature, which first came into the picture as an ethnic literature at the beginning of the20th century, has now grown into a flourishing branch of multi-ethnic American literature, attracting numerous experts’attention and motivating researches from both home and abroad. Since the1950s, the successive emergence of prestigious female writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gish Jen etc., has pushed Chinese American literature to a new height. These writers have vividly depicted the living circumstances of Chinese American immigrants and continuously revised their descriptions with the movement of the history. The themes of their works, simultaneously, have undergone substantial and profound changes accompanied with the historical factors.In terms of Chinese American literature researches, domestic scholars tend to shine a spotlight on Chinese American immigrants’seeking cultural identity, the identification as "others", the adaption of the oriental classic folk stories etc. based on a specific work by one certain author. This thesis, with the purpose to obtain a general and integral study on the themes of works of Chinese American literary works, carefully selects six representative works of different historical periods. By applying the Historicality of Understanding and Prejudices Theories in the analysis and taking the historical background into account, the thesis tries its best to reveal the themes of the six works so as to illustrate the profound influence that historical factors leave on the text and the reflections that the text mirror the reality.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the definition, development, current situation and previous studies of Chinese American literature. The second chapter elaborates the theory of Hermeneutics and its development, mainly explains Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Historicality of Understanding and Prejudices Theories in Hermeneutics and the reasons why this thesis adopt such theory. Chapter three mainly presents six prestigious Chinese American writers and their representative works in periods. Chapter four intensively analyzes the themes of the six works and then by combing the historical events, the thesis attempts to elaborate the relationship between the literary themes and the interpretation of the writers in different history periods. After an elaborate interpretation based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Historicality of Understanding and Prejudices Theories, the thesis makes a conclusion that the Chinese American writers select writing materials to reflect the history reality with their individual understanding and certain prejudice so as to construct their ideal themes of certain texts. The last chapter concludes the findings, limitations and humbly offers further research suggestions of this thesis.Throughout development of Chinese American literature, the literary themes continuously change to reflect the different history background. Meanwhile, the author’s writing maneuvers and themes are fixed under different historical context on account of their interpretation. Thus, literature is dominated by history and meanwhile, reflects history. It has been recording the continuous development, frication, communication and understanding between Chinese and American culture.