A New Historicist's Reading Of Ragtime

Edgar L. Doctorow is an important figure in contemporary American literary circle. His works have been well-received by the readers and are rewarded many prizes including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Doctorow, as a novelist, presumes a great sense of audacity in the fact that he believes the novelist's imagination is autonomous. He has been historical and unconcernedly subordinates facts into invention, claiming that history is a kind of imagery and fiction may be as true as history. This original idea foregrounds him from his peers.His has historical works as the following:Book of the Daniel(1970), Ragtime (1975),Billy Bathgate(1989) and the March (2005).Among them, Ragtime is the most successful one. In Ragtime, Doctorow audaciously lets the real personages in history appear on the same stage with the fictional ones, and at the same time weaves actual and fictional events together. In this way, Doctorow makes it impossible to tell what has really happened from what has not and presents a new panoramic picture of America in the first decade of the twentieth century. This echoes well the doctrine held by new historicists that history is temporal and changes with time, which is illustrated by their slogans "the historicity of texts" and "the textuality of histories". Through the comparison of the actual figures and their corresponding fictional ones in Ragtime, plus the comparison of the actual events and their corresponding fictional ones, this thesis aims to analyze Ragtime from the perspective of a new historicist by applying "the historicity of texts" and "the textuality of histories" into it. Furthermore, this paper makes an effort to show the significance of the construction of history in Ragtime, which echoes another tenet of new historicists—to subvert only in order to better contain it. In the end,this thesis manages to show that the history constructed in Ragtime is as true as any history written down and proves that literary works is a kind of shaping power in the forming of an ideology.Chapter 1 introduces E.L.Doctorow and acquaints readers with Ragtime.Chapter 2 is the theoretical basis of this paper. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 are the body part of this paper:it discusses about Doctorow's understanding of history, shows how the panoramic picture is reconstructed according to the doctrine advocated by new historicists and that the literary works influence the formation of an ideology. The thesis concludes in Chapter 5.