The Narratives About Nanking Massacre From The Perspectives Of New Historicism

During the Second World War,there were two extremely tragic massacres in the world.One was Nanking Massacre which dominated by Japanese militarism,and the other one was the Holocaust which carried out by Nazi Germany.Both of them have left deep traces in the history of mankind and have become an indelible traumatic memory for the whole world.On December 13,1937,the Nanking Massacre,which was caused by the Japanese invaders,was estimated to have killed more than 300,000 people.It has become the darkest one in the history of human civilization and a painful memory that Chinese people will never forget.However,before China decided to set December 13 as annual National Memorial Day for the victims of Nanking Massacre in 2014,people’s commemoration of this historical event only stayed at the local level.The establishment of the National Memorial Day reflects the firm position of the Chinese government in opposing the war of aggression,defending human dignity and safeguarding world peace.In order to remember and reflect on this period of history,the research on Nanking Massacre has made a lot of achievements in the field of history,but the research in the area of literature is relatively deficient.In recent years,due to the changes of international situation and national psychology,Nanking Massacre has gradually become the writing theme of Chinese and foreign writers.Based on the differences of national identity,cultural background and political position,the author’s narrative style has also changed a lot.For example,because of their special cultural background and growing environment,Chinese American writers usually adopt a disparate narrative perspective to rewrite this history in a heterogeneous culture that is different from the antagonistic opposition which often used by Chinese or Japanese writers when looking back at this great event in Chinese history.Based on the text analysis of Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem and Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War,this paper will mainly concentrate on the following two questions: how authors blur the boundary between history and literature to realize the positive interaction between history and text? And how they deconstructed and subverted the official grand narrative,then adopted the marginal narrative to achieve their writing purpose when they narrated such an international event? All these will be explored from the perspective of New Historicism and Narratology by the means of intensive reading and comparative study.Through the comparative analysis of these two works,this paper will find the similarities and differences in terms of their historical narrative,including the author’s marginal ideology,creative gist and writing style,then continue discovering and analyzing the deep reasons behind them.Meanwhile,it will wake up the common traumatic memory and national emotion of the people,so as to better remember history and never forget this national humiliation.This paper will be divided into five chapters.Chapter one is connected with the introduction of these two authors,these two works and relatively studies at home and abroad.The second chapter is a theoretical overview,which mainly introduces the theoretical core points that need to be used in this paper.The third and fourth chapters mainly analyze the text according to the narrative features of these two works with the core features of New Historicism.The last chapter analyzes the marginal consciousness and cultural identity of the authors of these two works,and deeply explores the reasons.