A New Historicism Analysis Of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers has been considered as one of the most influential Americansouthern women writer in the20thcentury since her establishment of the literaryreputation by the first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers isespecially good at depicting the characters’ loneliness and spiritual isolation, which isa constant theme in almost all her novels, with her profound sense of moral isolationand sharp insight of the characters’ inner lives. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is aspiritual presentation of the Southern Americans against the background of AmericanSouth in the1930s, the time between Great Depression and the Second World War.Among the researches on this novel, analysis on the theme of spititual isolation andloneliness, the characters’ grotesqueness, and religious implication takes a large partbut the study from the perspective of New Historicism is seldom touched.This thesis aims to analyze the interactive relationship between The Heart Is aLonely Hunter and its historical context, and explores the containment of thesubversive elements in the characters by the mainstream social ideology by applyingthe major theories of New Historicism:“Historicity of Texts”,“Textuality ofHistories”, and “Subversion and Containment”. It is not only an extension for thestudy of Carson McCullers, but also a new perspective provided for the research onthis field.