To Pursue Truth In The Margin Of History

In the course of development of contemporary literature, it is impossible to ignore and awkward to face the existence of New Historical Fiction. Starting from Red Sorghum by Mo Yan in 1986 and Soul Banner by Qiao Liang, experiencing the collective breakthrough of avant-garde writers, and contributed by various publications of neorealist and neonatal writers, the literary world has seen volumes of new historical fiction. However the concept of New Historical Fiction has not been clearly defined since the very beginning, its legal identity has been occasionally facing theoretical challenges, which makes it impossible for New Historical Fiction to perfectly justify its proper position in contemporary literature. So, this article stepping in the restudy of New Historical Fiction, tries to justify the term of New Historical Fiction as well as to clarify the relation between this style of fiction and other trends and theories of literature and art.In order to avoid misunderstanding and confusion, this article takes the term New Historical Fiction as the only name, and refers to relative writers as New Historical Fiction writers rather than New Historical Novelists. The study suggests that New Historical Fiction is a relative concept, compared with traditional historical fiction and revolutionary historical fiction, New Historical Fiction conveys brand new aesthetic principles, the newness is embodied in two aspects:one lies in new historical view and sense, the other lies in new narrative discourse and style. New Historical Fiction writers focus on describing marginal historical figures and stories, giving up epic treatment and thus changing the improper treatment of history on fiction. New Historical Fiction writers concern more about contemporary echoes of history, they meditate on and dialogue with history in the form of fiction, and they distinguish their work from traditional novel by subjective and personalized narrating. With a broad understanding of modern linguistic philosophy, these writers ponder the truth of history in view of literature, concerning on true living beings of individual and trying to convey psychological and poetical truth and constructing historical truth by distinct symbol of time.On the appraisal of New Historical Fiction, we hold that New Historical Fiction has provided precious experience to the contemporary development of fiction with its imagination and restoration of history by fictional discourse, with its exploration and recollection of multifaceted implications of history, and with its conscious pursuit of modern techniques of narration, even though there are desire-oriented description and vulgarization in narration, some of the works seem to exaggerate the dark side of history and some of the images are tainted with miscellaneous hues. New Historical Fiction has undoubtedly made its unique contribution to contemporary literature; it opens up a totally new canonical writing paradigm, showing a way for the successors to pursue truth in the margin of history, therefore the torch of new historical spirit can be carried on and shine with greater brilliance in the coming age.