Negotiation And Reciprocal Concern:A New Historicist Study On The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is Colson Whitehead’s first slave-narrative novel,unveiling the heavy mask of American slavery before the Civil War.This thesis interprets this literary work from the unique perspective of New Historicism.While studying the relationship between the historical context and the literary text,this thesis explores the negotiations and reciprocal concern among the author,the text and the socio-historical context.Stephen Greenblatt borrowed a number of economic terms to describe how social energy acts in the relationship between text and history,such as “social energy”,“negotiation”,and “circulation”.Montrose pointed out that the relationship between text and history should be a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.History is an extended text,and the text is a compressed history.New Historicism emphasizes the mutual dynamic negotiations and constructions between text and history,whose principle is to consider history and text simultaneously while doing literary research.It opens the door to history for literary study and lead to a poetic of culture.The one side of reciprocal concern is its focus on the historicity of texts.It means that all creations of literary works,even the readers’ reading of the text,contain social history and cannot be separated from history.As a literary text,The Underground Railroad is a product of culture and an important factor that promotes the circulation of social energy.It reflects how different discourses in society interact and produce complex social meanings when the text is produced.By close reading of The Underground Railroad,it is found that Whitehead is deeply affected by the recurrence of white supremacy and the residual racial problems in the United States.Then Whitehead creates the novel based on slavery before the American Civil War which tells the story of the black slaves fleeing along the underground railroad.It reveals Whitehead’s concern as a black author for the living condition of African Americans today.At the same time,Whitehead’s creation has also been influenced by other literary classics.In the blending and dialogue with these classic works,he speaks for blacks together with other black American writers.The other side of reciprocal concern is the textuality of history.It puts forward that the compilation of history is an issue of interpretation rather than fact.Through a close reading of The Underground Railroad,this thesis examines how the novel’s departures from the historical accounts on which it is based constitute a revision of those accounts.The novel restores the life experience of black slaves in a specific period and place as well as the tragic circumstances of some blacks under the internalized racial system.Then it analyzes how Whitehead interprets the history of slavery represented in the novel.In the end,Whitehead releases the voices of the oppressed black slaves as the nobodies and subverts the whites’ hypocrisies featuring“salvation by name,persecution in reality”.According to the historicity of text,The Underground Railroad strengthened various discourses circulating in the society at the time of Whitehead’s creating,including discourses of white supremacy and abolitionism.Therefore,the novel contains a constructive power on historical process.In summary,Whitehead has set an open ending in the text,and no one knows whether Cora has succeeded in gaining freedom,which to a certain extent reflects that the racial problem in the United States is still severe.By revealing the social and historical issues of slavery,it will trigger people’s rethinking of the living condition of blacks and question the promise written in Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.