A New Historicist Interpretation Of A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini, a promising Afghan-American writer in the current American literary history, sprang into fame via the publication of his first novel The Kite Runner, which was once on the bestseller list in America for more than 80 weeks. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which came off press in 2007 and was also immediately greeted by reviewers with rapturous applause, tells a compelling story of two Afghan women, born two decades apart, whose lives are brought together through a series of tragic events against Afghanistan’s recent history. With his two works, Hosseini opened a "literary window" on re-presentation of Afghan reality to the people all over the world.Emerging, developing, and booming in the 1980s, New Historicism is a mode of literary study based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period. New Historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural conditions which produced a text, as well as the meanings, effects and later critical interpretation and evaluation of the text. This thesis will employ such concepts put forward by New Historicists as "the historicity of text and the textuality of history", "subversion and containment" to analyze the controversial themes and the narrative strategies of A Thousand Splendid Suns within the New Historicist framework.Besides the introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into there chapters:The Introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Khaled Hosseini and his works, the literature review on A Thousand Splendid Suns, the general introduction to New Historicism and the significance of the study.Chapter One discusses the historicity and textuality of A Thousand Splendid Suns, analyzing the specific cultural, social and historical elements which shape this novel as well as the different interpretations constructed by different readers basing this novel. In the discussion of the historicity of the novel, the first section is about the binary identities of the author. As an in-between writer who is deeply influenced by both Afghan and American cultures, he cannot erase the marks of either culture in his novels. The second section is on the issue of women in Afghanistan. The prejudices and violence against women in Afghanistan are widely accepted and practiced, and there is no way for them to be heard. The forlorn status of Afghan women is a major cause for Hosseini to compose this novel. This work provides its readers from different countries and family backgrounds with an access to the unknown life of Afghan people, and enables them to construct their different histories on the basis of Khaled Hosseini and his A Thousand Splendid Suns.Chapter Two probes the subversive themes of the novel within New Historicist framework. The novel subverts the History with capital "H" of the mainstream culture via subverting the major values of Afghanistan such as honor, family and marriage, and rewrites the "her-stories"-Afghan women’s history through establishing Afghan women’s discourse. Meanwhile, the novel also expresses the voice contained by the mainstream ideology, as Hosseini himself is restricted by the prevailing patriarchal thoughts and Islamic religion.Chapter Three analyzes the narrative strategies of A Thousand Splendid Suns. To serve the themes of the novel, Hosseini applies various artistic techniques such as blanks, the insertion of Farsi and cultural symbol to add cultural flavors to this novel. The use of these techniques not only corroborates Hosseini’s binary cultural identities, but also contributes to the success of the novel.The last part serves as a conclusion, indicating that approaching the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns and its author Khaled Hosseini via the perspective of New Historicism, the interrelationship between the society, history and culture reflected in the novel can be further comprehended, and the subversive themes of the novel can be better understood. As a tribute to thousands of Afghan women, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which has rediscovered and reconstructed the suffering history of those resilient people, also calls for its numerous readers to pay attention to the living predicament of Afghan women.