Subversion And Containment—A Study Of Fifth Chinese Daughter And Bone From The Perspective Of New Historicism

After the flourishing development in the recent decades, the Chinese American literature has made a great progress. Among the numerous contributors to the Chinese American literature, Jade Snow Wong is called “the mother the Chinese American literature”, and this shows her important position in the history of the Chinese American literature obviously. Her famous autobiography novel Fifth Chinese Daughter is a very rare inspirational Chinese American novel with the record of the early struggling for life history of the Chinese Americans. And Fae Myenne Ng is one of the shinning star in the current Chinese American literature world, her Bone published in 1993 in the prose style, which also causes a sensation in the American literature circle. It discusses the different choices of the Chinese Americans in the multicultural atmosphere, and it emphasizes the natural trend of the multicultural survival strategies of the Chinese Americans in the current America.Represented by Greenblatt, the New Historicism stresses the social functions of the literature mostly; it tries to turn the internal study which is proposed by the scholars of the Russian Formalism, the New Criticism, the Deconstructivism and the Structuralism to the external study. It is Greenblatt who comes up with the concept of the subversion and containment function of the literature and he greatly emphasizes the function of the containment by studying the drama by Shakespeare, while Dorymore stands on his opposite. He believes that the subversion function can show great power.This paper tries to analysis the subversion and containment functions in the two works Fifth Chinese Daughter and Bone with the social function theories of the literature of the New Historicism. Altogether this paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction which is mainly about the definition of the Chinese American literature and the subversions of it, the authors and their novels, the literature review on the Chinese American literature at home and abroad. Chapter two gives an introduction to the New Historicism, the development at home and abroad, its features and the theories about the social functions of the literature. Chapter three studies the Fifth Chinese Daughter and Bone with the theories of the subversion function from the images of the main characters in the two books, the accepting of the American thoughts, and the attitudes toward the Chinese food. Chapter four, with the containment function theory of the NewHistoricism, this paper discusses the containment functions from the education ideas, the feudal thoughts and the image of mother. Chapter five is the conclusion. This chapter summarizes the ideas in previous chapters, it affirms the endeavors that the authors do in subverting the yellow-bellied, sniff and inflexible negative images of the Chinese Americans, the different functions of the six factors show that the effect of subverting the negative images of the Chinese Americans is various.This paper discusses the effort of the two authors have made in subverting the negative images of the Chinese Americans with the Chinese American literature works. By the analysis of the subversion and containment function of the two books from the six factors, it aims to find out whether the current Chinese American works are more powerful to subvert the negative images of the Chinese Americans, and then to give a conclusion that how the images of the Chinese Americans in the American mainstream culture changed. At the same time, the positive American images have been showed in the two books; this reflects the American mainstream culture is powerful. And it also believes that all of the factors above are the advantageous aspects for the Fifth Chinese Daughter and Bone to get the favorable impression of the American mainstream culture and then get success immediately.