Textual Reconstruction Of Slave History In The Known World

Edward P. Jones is another African American novelist with unique writing style after Tony Morrison. Instead of centering racial issues, Jones's works focus on describing the past experience of African Americans and their life in contemporary society. The Known World is his first novel, as well as his masterpiece on American slavery. The novel develops around the theme of black slave owners, and with the explicit depiction of characters and detailed settings, it probes deeper into the complex natures of American slavery.In recent years, some African American novelists use the postmodern writing techniques, such as parody, borrowing, patchwork, to dismantle the traditional form of slave narrative fiction, highlighting their concern of the textual construction of history. Some of the contemporary historiography writers put more emphasis on the textual representation of historical events, and strives to achieve a dynamic balance between historical reality and discourse field. Proceeding from this perspective and drawing from insights of Western historiography on the relationship between history and the text, this paper tries to study the textual reconstruction of slave history embodied in The Known World, in order to explore the growing trend of contemporary slave narrative. The novel not only probes into the interaction between the history and text within the contemporary slave narrative, but also breaks the traditional mode of "master History" by directing attention to the "diverse histories" of marginalized slaves. In the light of theories of new historicism and postmodern historiography, the paper explores Jones's unique mode to revisit the history of slavery, which, while challenging the traditional slave narrative, anticipates the way contemporary texts about slavery develops.