《蝴蝶君》的新历史主义分析英语语言文学专业论文.docxVIP

三峡大学硕士学位论文 三 峡 大 学 硕 士 学 位 论 文 I III Abstract David Henry Hwang is a famous Chinese American playwright. He was rewarded the Tory Prize for his play M. Butterfly. Because he is a Chinese American, many of his works are about the cultural conflicts between the Asian Americans and the white Americans. His early works FOB and The Dance and the Railway are about the theme of cultural conflicts between different races. M. Butterfly is also similar in theme. It’s a play about cultural prejudices, gender power relations and history. The three elements entwine with each other in the play and constitute the whole play. Without any of them, the play would not be able to be conceived. New historicism is a theory coming into being in the early 1980. Different from the New Critics, it stresses the historical and cultural specificity of the literary work and advocates analyzing literary works from the perspective of its historical and social background. It also accentuates the interactive relations between literature, history and culture. This thesis is committed to analyzing M. Butterfly from the perspective of new historicism. It points out the mutually formative relations between the play and its cultural and historical specificity and also notes the history different than the commonly known one. And it also uses Greenblatt’s containment theory to not only analyze the subversion effect of the play but also point out the containment effect of the play. The first part of the thesis gives an introduction of Hwang and his works, with M. Butterfly as the focal point, as well as the domestic and foreign research on M. Butterfly. It also introduces the main theories of New Historicism, including Greenblat’s cultural poetics and containment theory, Hayden White’s theory of Metahistory, and Louis Montrose’s theory of historicity of text and textuality of history. The second part is the cultural specificity of M. Butterfly, falling into two parts, the western stereotyped view of the