The New History Of Literary Criticism In China

The American new historicism arose in the studies of literature during the Renaissance period, and has produced wide and deep influence in the circles of literary criticism and literary theory of America and England from the end of 1970s to the beginning of 1990s.Its appearance had certain associations with such backgrounds as the re-attaching importance to the historical dimensionality initiated by the American literary criticism circle, the overturning of the conventional conception of history by some theoretical concepts such as the western structuralism, narrativism and the philosophy of history in the second half of 20th century, the rising of cultural studies since 1960s, and the historical and cultural turn in the American academic fields in 1980s.With the characteristics of open theoretical formation and extensive theoreticalscope, the new historicism literary criticism absorbed some ideological trends ofWestern Marxism and deconstructionism, and used some viewpoints and methods insuch subjects as history, sociology and anthropology for reference. For this reason, itshaped its proper concepts of history and literature and studying method of culturalpoetics.In the view of the new historicists, the nature of history's existence is a text or a discourse, so it's inevitable that it would carry some colors of narrators' subjective fabrication or imagination, thus the historical reality could only be a relative one which has neglected the explaining strategies and reading context. The historical concept of the new historicism has got its enlightenment from that of the post-modernism. In the opinion of the new historicists, the production and interpretation of a text cannot transcend a given historical context. Therefore, by referring to the intertextuality between literature and history, one can review all the social, historical and cultural phenomena of a given age. Literature participates in the historical course, and it also has its hand in shaping the reality. Based on these new...