A New Historical Analysis Of Lord Of The Flies

William Golding, a British novelist, is one of the most influential experimentalists after the World War Ⅱ and the1983Noble Prize winner for literature. He is a prolific novelist and composes Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, The Pyramid and Darkness Visible and other novels. His novels contain the moral spirit of realism and existentialism, mysterious and variable classic allergies and fables as well as critical and nihilistic narrations, so he has got various reputations like "moralist","fabulist" and "theorist". However, William Golding regards himself as a "story-teller", same as self-interpretation and self-fashioning proposed by Stephen Greenblatt, the significant creator of new historicism.Lord of the Flies is the first novel written by William Golding and makes him successful in the field. Published after being refused many times, this novel becomes a bestseller and adapted for two films. It represents the moral and power values of adult world in the form of children’s book, employing island survival, beast crisis and multiple images involved in politics, science, religion and culture, and can be called a micro-history of human morality. Therefore, this novel conforms to the cultural metaphor practices done by new historicists across disciplines with multiple angles.From the point of new historicism, this thesis will analyze the "micro-history" represented under the whole political and historical development in this novel with theories of poetics of culture as well as intertextuality between history and texts.The thesis consists of five parts:The first part includes the brief introduction of William Golding and his Lord of the Flies, and the literature review of researches at home and abroad.The second part is the interpretation of the concept, theoretical bases and critical modes of new historicism.The third part analyzes the political and social mode created in the novel with the cultural poetics by Greenblatt including the poetic metaphors of primitive society, democracy, science and religion to represent the human history told by Golding. Then this part also comes to symbols of powers and their operation based on the discourse power theory and then concludes Golding’s narrative style through this micro-history amid the novel.The fourth part employs the intertextuality of history and literature to explore the creation mode of this novel reflecting to the past literature and society, that is the intertextual relations respectively with Golding’s experience and other islands novels like The Coral Island, then the comparison of different representations of the same historical events between Golding and other novelists in the same era like Henry Green and Samuel Beckett, finally the enlightenment of Golding’s writing mode to the modern composition. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis, in which the new historical features of the novel are summarized, especially emphasizing its influences to modern composition.