The Existence Of History In Historical Novels: Realism And Ideographicism

The historical novel is one of the important article classes and popular with people, especially in China, which has five thousands years of history of civilization. The historical novel manifests the factors of both history and novel. It generated directly from the historical and biographical literature.Compared with other narrative literature, it attracts more attention because of its reletion with the sacred history. At the same time, it is also envelopped the shadow of history, that is say,it demands historical factor excessively. In the 1980s, the Western new historicism stepped into the historical arena with the posture of revolting against the old historicism and cleaning up formalism. Using the language angle ,it suspected the objectivity of history and then the whole historical record. Almost at the same time, the tide of "the new historical novel" came into being in China. Through writing the folk history, the village history and so on, these novels displayed differently historical consciousness and spirit from the traditional ones. They had the impact on people's reading extent. In the field of theory, "the historical novel", "the reality of history" and so on were been re-discussed. Taking the existent shape of history in historical novel as the subject and associating with the morden scholar's theories, this article proposes that the historical novel should be divided into two kinds: the realistic one and the ideographic one.Also it attempts to define clearly both's existent basis and the text characteristic.The question of history and the literature's relation is a platitude. At first, literature did not been divided from history .Then the new historicism present the idea of intertextuality of the two. It seems that it is a return.But,it is the change of the conception of history : from the historical view of holism to the new historicism's one . The former emphasizes that history progress according to some certain historical rule .It believes that history is progressive,and this kind of progress is a objective and inevitable tendency. The latter argues that the history has the textuality and it is a lingual mythn.It emphasizes the cyclicity, subjectivity and fortuity and manifested the tendency of counter-historicism . As a result of presenting the history, historical novel also passed through from realism to spiritualism. The realistically historical novel takes the traditionally historical novel as representative.It pays more attention to the paralogy, representation and rationality.Meanwhile, the latter emphasizes the expression of subjective emotion. It pays great attention to absorb the object's lingering charm and ignores taking the form. It takes the new historical novel as representative. The two kinds of novel have different esthetic spirit and text characteristic. The authors of the former, in line with the spirit of realism, try hard to reappear the historical events in grand narrative, using the realistic skill. It aims at the recorded fact outward. In the ideographically historical novel, the authors reprensent differently historical consciousness,using the writing strategy of the accident resembles and through marginalizational history.With the society's development, the historical view may change.Then, the form of history existing in the historical novel would change.Historical novel's two kinds of existent forms have the realistic and the theoric basis.As the interpretation of history and a special esthetic ideology, its function of cognition, education and the esthetics should be unified.Dividing the form of history existing in the historical novel into the realistic one and the ideographic one is the innovetion of this article. Everything are progressing,so is the history. After new historicism, the history may appear in the novel with another kind of features.