View The Female New Historical Novel In China From The New Historicism Perspective

At the end of 1980 s, the theory of the New Historicism was introduced to China and it changed with the stirring of the contemporary Chinese context. Under the dual function of the New Historicism and the domestic cultural thoughts, the new historical novel, a new fiction type, appeared in the Chinese literary world. Among those, the new historical novel written by Female Writers showed different aesthetic characteristics and historical ideas from masculine authors’. This kind of work is hiding unique "small history" consciousness and the inter-textuality in female history which is rediscovered, and it reflects the group spirit appeal and deep cultural psychology of the contemporary Chinese women writers, which is worth of paying attention to and in-depth research.This paper is divided into three parts.In the first part, it narrates the New Historicism’s development and features at home and abroad. The article take Stephen Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning” and Hayden White’s “Metahistory” for instance to analyze the development of the "New Historicism". And then it summarizes the foreign theory’s features: the strong subversive and struggle. After combing the status of theory introduction in China, the paper analyzes domestic new historicism’s localization characteristics such as valuing art creation guidance more than theory summary. At the same time, the basic track of the generation and evolution of Chinese women’s new historical novels are sketched. We made an overall analysis on Chinese women’s new historical novels from four aspects: concept definition, research status, development stage and subject classification.The second part is the core of the paper. The new historical novels written by Chinese female mainly show the following aesthetic features: "small history" consciousness and deconstruction narration’s subversion of "big history"; the inter-textuality in female history which is rediscovered; the increasing female consciousness towards center and standard; explorations on the novel artistic technique like metaphor, irony, cross cultural Montage.In the third part, it discusses and analyses the significance and development dilemma of Chinese female new history novels. On the one hand, Chinese female new historical novel has changed the "record" tradition in the creations of Chinese historical novels, and resumes novels’ dominant position of the Chinese Literary Creation. And the creation of female new history novels broadens the space of literary creation. On the other hand, female new history novels walk up to Non-Historicism because of the external environment and the lack of their own theories. The decline in the number of fiction writings and the loss of the status of women made female new history novels walk into the plight of development. Finally, the paper explores the ways to get out of the predicament of female new historical novels: Re-examining the relationship between men and women, and mining new creative resources.