A New Historicist Approach To Beloved

As one of the most formally sophisticated novelists in the history of African American literature,Toni Morrison(1931-)has exerted a vibrating influence upon the literary world.Her achievement in literature marks another monument in the twentieth-century African American literature after the summit reached by Richard Wright(1908-1960)and Ralph Ellison(1914-1994).Beloved(1987),Morrison’s masterpiece,deals with the legacy of slavery in its depiction of a runaway slave’s struggle to claim the freed self.Since its publication,Beloved has inspired numerous reviews,essays and book-length studies on various subjects with different critical methodologies like post-colonialism,narratology,psychoanalysis,feminism,trauma theory,postmodern realism both at home and abroad.Yet,there are few researches on Morrison’s view of art and history reflected in this novel from the perspective of New Historicism.This thesis,on the basis of the previous studies and by reconsidering the historical and cultural context of Beloved and its representation,seeks to restore and reconstruct the history of black race in the context of New Historicism,and to demonstrate the permanent historical trauma resulting from the unspoken and unspeakable historical memory under slavery,which fully reveals the author’s strong consciousness of history and nationality and her noble humanity.Moreover,a historical analysis and close-reading are to be made so as to find out the deeper social significance from this novel.New Historicism is a cultural poetics that reinterprets historical texts on a political basis.It challenges the hypothesis which makes an absolute division between artistic production and other social production and advocates associating a literary text with its historical context,interpreting literary works in a broader historical and cultural context.Morrison has a strong consciousness of history and nationality.Most of her novels are set in African-American history,among which Beloved is the most representative one that incarnates her reflections on the past and echoes American history of slavery.Here,it can be found the juxtaposing relationship between history and literature,which is also the core of New Historicism.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion,the main body of this thesis includes five chapters.To begin with,the literature review elaborates gains and losses of the previous studies on Beloved,and throws light on the research focus and significance of the thesis.Then comes the theoretical framework of New Historicism including its background and development,with emphasis on its major concerns.Guided by the theory,the chapters that follow first explore the historical restoration and reconstruction in the novel Beloved,reflecting the homogeneity of literature and history as discourse practice;then disclose the historical trauma of the major characters in the novel,thus reconstructing the haunting memory of the black under slavery.Last but not least,the thesis probes into Morrison’s historical consciousness as shown in the novel.The innovation of this thesis lies in combining “historical discourse” with “literary discourse” to achieve the goal of examining and reflecting on reality,embodying the author’s rational thinking on the past,present and future living conditions of the black people and her unremitting exploration of the way to construct a better future,and meantime appealing to readers for having the same or even more reflections like Morrison.These are the social functions of literature and the social responsibilities literary works can shoulder as seen from Beloved.