Historical Narrative In Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession

An Insular Possession is a long historical novel written by Timothy Mo. This novel takes the opium war as the background. In this novel, Timothy Mo unfolds varieties of historical events in the colonial process of Hong Kong by Britain Empire. The author employs a particular historical narrative method to process historical events. Timothy Mo shows the relationship between the history as the “historical” narrative and that as “fiction” narrative in this novel. Based on the historical materials such as appendixes, photography, and news report, the author plotted the events elaborately. Because the fictional text cannot be limited by time, space, real person and true events, An Insular Possession has imaginative and fictional characteristics, and the author successfully makes the readers reflect and evaluate the whole opium war with the writer’s narration.By close reading and studying of documents, this thesis tries to study the historical narrative strategies of An Insular Possession in the light of Hayden White’s historical narrative theory.First of all, from cognition perspective, this thesis deconstructs the binary opposition between “fact”and “fiction” with an angle of formal argument. This chapter analyses the text from the following aspects: shift of narrative perspectives, “implied editor”, characteristic of metafiction, and specious appendixes.Next, from the perspective of aesthetic perception, this thesis discusses the emplotment of historical events. The writer chooses certain events, bestows certain motivation, and makes “historical events” as a whole “history”. This chapter also reveals how the poetic language deconstructs and reconstructs the history.At last, this thesis discusses the ideological implication from the ethic perspective. This chapter analyses the discourse of the news report and the misunderstanding and prejudice of Chinese culture and value, which implies the marginal status of Chinese people in this period in Hong Kong. What’s more, this chapter reveals the author’s deep sympathy for the Chinese people who are struggling for life, and it also reveals the anxiety of the author’s identity.