An Analysis of Beloved from the Perspective of New Historicism

Mengxi Xiao

doi:10.54097/62j26558

Authors

Mengxi Xiao

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/62j26558

Keywords:

New Historicism, Beloved, discourse, Textuality of History, Historicity of Texts

Abstract

American black writer Toni Morrison’s (1931-2019) novel Beloved is an in-depth exploration of the deplorable living situations and psychological trauma of marginalized African American slaves, based on a famous historical case. New historicists emphasize on the stories told or written by those marginalized groups, and their concerns can be applied to Morrison’s novel. This paper analyzes Beloved from the perspective of New Historicism, aiming to explore how the writer achieved the interaction between history and text, reconstructed and revealed the history of those marginalized people neglected by mainstream history, and reconstructed and reestablished their own cultural identities and voices by helping African Americans to fill in the missing historical memories of the period of slavery through the text.

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References

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