Historicity Of Texts And The Textuality Of Histories

Western Novels developed with process of West Movement. And Cooper's The Last of Mohicans, Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp and Owen Wister's The Virginian, the three chosen subjects in this thesis appeared at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of West Movement respectively. On the one hand, according to"the text is historical", each of the three novels showed us variously in different settings and images at different stages of West Movement. On the other hand, they also possess some similarities from many aspects, such as ideology of capitalism, submissiveness under capitalism etc which are showed with the help of'the history is textal', for historical texts are also noted down by human beings. And this makes it possible that some historical truth is neglected during the process of noting down history. Therefore, the similarities of the three novels chosen here just tell us the other aspect of West Movement, for literary texts also reflected history like historical texts themselves. In a word, historical texts help us read literary texts thoroughly, and vice versa, literary texts also show us some historical truth neglected from historical texts. Finally, after making contrast and comparison of the three novels, the influence of West Movement on nation-fashioning of the United States will also be demonstrated clearly, such as self-reliance, good human nature and the development of civilization.This thesis will apply theories from New Historicism and some other relevant information to analyzing the three chosen novels under the background of West Movement, so that the influence on nation-fashioning will be shown with the help of the result of contrast and comparison of the three novels.