The Modern History Play On The Context Of New Historicism

For a long time, the research on history play has made enormous achievement. However, most are limited to the point of old historicism. This paper attempt to re-examine some important theoretical issues about history play from a new perspective, that is, New Historicism, in order to open another side of the research of history play and observe the creation of history play according to the thinking of 'the texuality of the histories'.The full text can be divided into four parts. The first part briefly observes the present situation of the research on Chinese modern history play and defines the scope of history play, that is, all the plays derived from historical events and historical figures in the history texts, including forms of drama, modern drama, TV, movies and so on.The second part mainly studies the relationship between history play and narration, and analyzes the connection of history play and history and the types of history play from the view of history play on New Historicism, considering history and history play as a relationship between a text narration and a performance or that between a real event and a creation, and the so-called "historical truth" is only a Utopia; while for the types of history play, they have absorbed the theory of post-modernism narrative of Hayden White, and have classified history play into four types: romance, tragedy, comedy and slapstick.The third part mainly makes some new-historicism analysis about some individual cases of modern history play from three aspects. First of all, it discusses the tendency of japing history and consuming unofficial history that exist in modern history play with a big quantity. Secondly, it explains the narrative tactics of turning "History" into "histories" in history plays. At last, it analyzes the phenomenon of the transition between ancient times and contemporary times that exists in the creation of history play. The fourth part discusses the relationship between history play and reality again, and indicates that a typical characteristic of new historicism is its "cultural politics", as a result the study on "history" and "history play" shows a distinct intent of criticizing the cultural politics.At last, the conclusion part adopts the concept of 'Historiphoty', which conveys history and our opinions about certain history through visual images and movie languages has to some extent broadened the scope of the research about literature and history and has became the best method to make history popular.