A New Historicisim Perspective Of In America And The Volcano Lover

Susan Sontag is an active contemporary academic scholar in America. She covers a wide range of fields, including literary and artistic criticism, fiction, philosophy, culture,and so on. Foreign scholars have researched Susan Sontag relatively early and published a lot of papers and monographs. But recently, domestic scholars research the results of Susan Sontag relatively less. The advent of the new historicism, which accompanied by a contemporary Western academia"cultural shift"and the"Historical Turn". New Historicism as a characteristic of a post-modern social and cultural ideas,has a very important impact on the traditional view of history and historical themes creative ideas. Susan Sontag conforms to this trend and starts to create historical themes. Historical Novels,"In America"and"The Volcano Lover",are masterpieces in this area. She re-examines history by a new perspective and a new discourse and clearly reflects the spirit of new historicism, then opening up a vast area of the arts. In this paper, on the basis of the previous research results and with the background of the times, I attempt to analyze the themes, the image of characters, the artistic characteristics of two novels by new historical perspective, then show Sontag's high technologies dealing with the complex relationship history and literature, history and culture. The paper is divided into three chapters: The first chapter reflects multiple themes of the novels, the writer restricts the history, dismantles the traditional mainstream history and reposes utopian ideal. The second chapter inspects specially the female consciousness in the context of history, deconstructs the lofty image of male, then achieves the goal of gender harmony finally. The third chapter analyzes the main narrative of the novel's unique strategy and reflects a bold exploration on the art form. The part of conclusion sums up viewpoints of three chapters,then concludes that Susan Sontag examines and characterizes the history by a new perspective and discourse, which clearly reflect the spirit of the new history. This paper adopts a new historical perspective , studies comprehensively the meaning of these two works. It can be said that this opens up a new way of thinking space and adds to the blank Sontag's fictions , to a certain extent.