A Study On Look Homeward,Angel’s Cultural Poetics

In the early 20th century,Southern writer Thomas Wolfe,who earned himself the cachet with the rhapsodic and autobiographical narrative features in the American literature,was hailed as "America’s Proust" by many critics.His first novel Look Homeward,Angel,regarded as the memoir of his mature experiences,centers the stories of Eugene Gant’s family and depicts a series of vicissitudes of the post-bellum Southern town—Altamont,in terms of economy,concepts and social life,in order to reveal the collective bewilderment of the Southerners during the reconstruction period.In the novel,Wolfe has his historical awareness obviously presented that he rebuked the infringement the Northern industrial discourse had on Southern traditional civilization,and he also criticized the conventional ideas deeply rooted in the Southern society.Meanwhile,through Eugene’s exploration during his growing-up,Wolfe entitled the novel with the theme of an odyssey to quest and his huge concerns about personal bewilderment was quite clear as well.The thesis borrows the theory of New Historicism to expound Wolfe’s historical awareness and the theme of bewilderment.On the one hand,the thesis,by dint of "the historicity of text" and "the textuality of history" proposed by New Historicist Louis Montrose,analyzes the historical influence on the novel by juxtaposing the novel and the historical texts of the 20th century in the South.That is,Wolfe revealed the Northern industry’s strong striking against the Southern agrarianism and the Southerners’ collective trauma caused by their failure in the Civil War under the background of the Southern history.On the other hand,the thesis aims at the novel’s reshaping function on history,that is,the small histories of Southern individuals with the aim to reconstruct a real South.For instance,Eugene’s mother’s craze for property led to a shattered family and the teenagers’ enlistment in the army was barely out of their heroic complex.Then,the thesis also focuses on the theory of cultural poetics proposed by Stephen Greenblatt,another representative of New Historicism,and attempts to dig out the multiple interactions among work,writer,and history in the novel Look Homeward,Angel that Wolfe effectively bridged the novel and the history and enlightened later literary creation by his autobiographical features and thick description strategies.Thus he fulfilled the transition from narrative history to cultural poetics.On top of discovering its poetic attraction and aesthetic values,a New Historical approach to the novel also can prompt reflections on the current bewildering living state.