A New Historicist Perspective Of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men

The outstanding Chinese American woman writer Maxine Hong Kingston(1940---) published China Men in 1980, which not only won the 1981 American Book Award but was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. She tells the history of four different generations of Chinese immigrants in her unique way.This thesis attempts to apply the important concepts of New Historicism—“the historicity of texts” and “the textuality of history”, and focus on the interplaying between historical facts and their textual representation to interpret Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men.The thesis consists of five parts.The first part introduces Kingston’s life and her works. Then it introduces the theoretical framework of the thesis, namely, the redefinition of history and literature from the viewpoint of New Historicism, the historicity of texts and the textuality of history by Louis Montrose. All of these New Historicist theories are closely and inherently related to the theme of the thesis.The second part discusses historical reconstruction of texts in China Men. The texts are not only the reflection and products of social and historical circumstances. They also have the function of shaping society and history development. And it selects several important historical events involved in Kingston’s China Men, the Gold Mountain dream, various ways of entering America, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882 and the Vietnam War to reconstruct the whole atmosphere of Chinese immigration history.The third part explores textual representation of history. History cannot be thoroughly ad objectively represented at present, so people can only access history by texts. Kingston’s reconstructing Chinese American history, namely, her oral tradition of storytelling, and the juxtaposition of reconstructed history and reconstructed myths. And by these ways, Kingston attempts to be against sexual prejudice and racialism, and subvert the American ideological mainstream.The interplaying of Kingston’s textual representation and historical facts representation forms the complex intertextuality between them, and makes it toward myths and poetics. And it also rests on the fact the fictional story intentionally and continuously intrudes on the historical events, which makes readers know clearly the misery history of Chinese American immigrants and subversion of American mainstream. It’s the fourth part.To sum up, the thesis takes advantage of New Historicism, especially Louis Montrose’s paradoxical notion, “the historicity of texts” and “the textuality of history” to interpret how Kingston remaps history of Chinese American immigrants and subverts American mainstream ideology. And she presents readers the harshness of Chinese Americans, the inhuman treatments they received and the great contribution they made to America. As one of the literary representative of Chinese American history, the book’s value and position is so great that its ideology and artistic features are worth of further study.