The emergence of the social and cultural trend of new historicism marks an important turn in contemporary Western academic thought. The basic theory of new historicism is the theory of "intertextuality". New Historicism is essentially a historicism of language texts and cultural texts that are fictitiously, imaginatively or metaphorically linked to history. It has obvious postmodernist characteristics such as criticality, dissolution and subversion, emphasizing the subject's influence on history. Intervention and rewriting. The emergence of New Historicism is a double backlash against traditional historicism and formalism. It breaks through the strict barriers of literary disciplines, expands multi-dimensional research space, and moves towards broad interdisciplinary research. The combination of new historicism and cultural studies shows a strong political tendency and ideology, and has the duality of both dissolving and supplementing historical materialism.

[Keywords] New Historicism; Social and Cultural Thoughts; Comparative Analysis

The emergence of New Historicism is accompanied by the "cultural turn" in contemporary Western academia. Historical Turn”. As a social and cultural trend with postmodernist characteristics, New Historicism has had a very important impact on the traditional view of history and the creative concepts of historical themes. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a macro-dialectical comprehensive analysis of this complex social and cultural trend of thought.

1. An important shift in academic thought

The basic characteristics of New Historicism show a double backlash against the so-called traditional historicism and formalism. New Historicism is still an academic school without a unified theoretical program, and it is an uncertain concept that has not yet been recognized. Because of this, interpretations of New Historicism are very different. In terms of countries, there are differences between the American school and the British school. Although the "cultural materialism" promoted by the British School is on the fringe, it shows a relatively strong political and cultural color. The American school focuses on the reconstruction of the social and cultural fields. New historicism, as a new theory and new criticism after the decline of postmodernism and poststructuralism, shows strong momentum. Due to the diversity of historical concepts held by different scholars, the interpretation of New Historicism is even more different. Some people believe that "history" is expressed as the narrative of dominant power relations and power struggles. Some argue that "history" is the story of power told by a variety of voices, including marginalized forces and figures. Some people understand history as the complex internal and external relationship between literary texts and social existence. Others expressed criticism and disgust towards New Historicism, ridiculing those "New-chasers" who are devoted to "cultural criticism garbage" who try to subvert great literary classics and use literature to transform society. They can only be a kind of "civilized barbarians" "Fantasy.

An important representative of New Historicism is Stephen Greenblatt. In 1982, he launched the banner of "New Historicism" in the preface of a special issue of "Wengen" magazine. Stephen Greenblatt’s academic partners include Louis Montrose, Jonathan Dollimore, Hayden White, Charlie Lehane and Kari Lippert, etc. Their theories have their own uniqueness. , and has the same sex. Hayden White confuses historical facts with the linguistic expression of historical facts by giving history an imaginary poetic structure. His works "Metahistory", "Discourse Metonymy", and "Content of Form" all increasingly poeticize history, believing that history is a text constructed with words and a "literary fiction". "Historical text" is a literary historical text, a "narrative" "discourse" text, thus turning "history" into "poetics". The postmodernist view of history believes that history is essentially a kind of historical poetics and a "fiction of language", which fundamentally denies the objectivity, authenticity, regularity and scientificity of history. With the transfer of "deconstructive criticism" to various hermeneutics in the 1980s, various hermeneutic interpretation models, especially the theory of reception and response to literature and history and the theory of interpretation, have been integrated into the new historicism to a certain extent. in cultural trends.

This is a historic turning point. The mainstream of Western literary theory no longer limits literature to a narrow circle of textual self-discipline. Instead, it reverses its past aversion to politics and tilts towards history, politics, race, gender and ideology. Formalism covers up the social and political functions of theory, ignores the issues of national power and women's rights, and covers the contradictions and conflicts between various classes.

The interest of New Historicism literary research began to shift from the "internal" study of literature to the "external" study of literature, restoring and re-establishing the historical and social background of literature.

Compared with formalism, new historicism shows strong academic advantages. The strict barriers of literary disciplines began to be broken through, leading to open interdisciplinary research. The original literary concept that was limited to closed text research began to open up to history, sociology, politics, ethics, anthropology, ethnology, and psychoanalysis, expanding a multi-dimensional research space. Various interdisciplinary connections in literary theory interpenetrate, integrate, interpret and interact with each other, forming commensurability and coherence of interpretation. The study of the aesthetic characteristics and special laws of literature itself has been neglected, and there is even a tendency to exclude literary research with cultural research. The overall trend in the development of literary theory is towards broad cultural studies and new historicist cultural poetics.

The combination of new historicism and cultural studies shows a strong political tendency and ideology. Literary theory turns to and focuses on cultural studies, paying more attention to ideology, power struggles, ethnic issues, and cultural characteristics, and criticizing social systems and political ideological systems and principles that are considered unreasonable from a political perspective. The cultural criticism movement of New Historicism has both positive and negative sides. It not only attacks the absurdity and alienation phenomena of capitalist society, but also obliterates the historical role of progress in capitalist society and only emphasizes the "one-sided people" formed by suppression. Pain, not recognizing the duality of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.

New historicism has a strong historical ideology. New Historicism stimulates, mobilizes and utilizes the destructive and subversive nature of literature and cultural research through the critical movement, fights and challenges mainstream ideologies, and achieves the purpose of rewriting history, cultural history and literary history from the language level. However, this kind of cultural research and cultural criticism with strong ideological nature often does not respect the objective reality and objective regularity of history. The rewriting of historical texts from the language level also has obvious positive and negative sides, and some The history that has been misread or omitted is corrected and supplemented, and some arbitrarily distorts and reverses the history that was originally read and written.

New historicism examines history as a whole from the perspective of cultural studies by establishing an overall connection between text and history. New historicism breaks the cage of language symbols and formal structures, overcomes the dehistoricization tendency of textualism and formalism, and re-explores the relationship between literature and history. However, this overall perspective is often superficial and flat, ignoring, covering up or dissolving the basic, primary and dominant aspects and processes of the main social and historical structures. New historicism faces the historical context and reinterprets the meaning of literary works. As a counterattack and correction to the text-centered literary theory system, it has become a new style that is different from traditional historicism and formalism. Literary concepts and critical methods. Because of this, New Historicism is often attacked from both sides by various historicist literary theory systems and various formalist literary theory systems.

2. Basic Theory of New Historicism

How to understand history and how to understand the relationship between history and contemporary times? Studying history is not the ultimate goal. Most people do not study history for the sake of studying history. They always want to contribute to the normal and healthy development of contemporary history by studying history. History is nothing but the past tense of today, and today is nothing but the present tense of history. The contemporary era is nothing but the continuation, activation and continuous generation of history. Croce said that all history is contemporary history. Hegel pointed out that all history is contemporary. The long and profound history has accumulated rich and precious human experience and collective wisdom. In order to seek a realistic and poetic survival and pray for a better future, people always take history as their teacher and ask old historical figures for advice, either using the past to learn from the present, or using the past to describe the present, or using the past to satirize the present. In order to solve some major social and life problems in real life, people often explore historical resources and use the thoughts, costumes and languages ??of the ancients to perform new live dramas of contemporary history. People's understanding of history has always been dualistic, either as historical facts or as historical stories. Herodotus of ancient Greece, known as the father of history, believed that history refers to stories that really happened. Starting from the pursuit of historical truth, the science of history was formed; starting from the narration of historical stories, one can resort to literary fiction and imagination.

Fundamentally speaking, historical stories that rely on literary fiction, imagination, and narration are essentially derived and deduced from real historical facts, and should not be covered, changed, or replaced with literary fiction, imagination, and narration at will. Real historical facts. Some important theoretical and practical issues arise here, namely the relationship between the ideological and poetic nature of history, the scientific nature and literary nature of history, and the relationship between historical truth and artistic truth.

In order to solve some of the above major theoretical and practical problems, Western scholars have proposed a theory of intertextuality. The polyphony theory and dialogue theory proposed by the Russian scholar Bakhtin's poetics already contain intertextual factors. The person who more systematically advocates the theory of intertextuality is the French feminist critic Julia Kristeva. Her "Semiotics" discusses the commensurability between texts, believing that different texts can serve as mirrors of each other, embedding and reflecting each other, absorbing and transforming each other, forming a diachronic and ** *Two dimensions of tense are continuously generated into an open network of text. Intertextuality theory began to appear mainly as a theory of interpretation of literary texts. It is worth noting that when this intertextuality theory penetrates into the field of cultural studies, especially into the new historicist criticism, it has transformed from the intertextuality between literary texts to the intertextuality between literary texts and historical texts. intertextuality. Although the march of intertextuality theory into the field of history has opened up a broader academic vision for literary and cultural studies, due to the shift of the focus of intertextuality theory in new historicism cultural criticism to literary texts, historical background and cultural language In terms of the relationship between literature and context, this transcendence makes intertextuality theory inevitably confuse the boundaries between literature and history, leading to a famous saying of New Historicism: "the historicity of text and the textuality of history" [1]. New historicism emphasizes focusing on the contemporary perspective, using the two-way reference of intertextuality between literary texts, historical texts and historical contexts to explain past historical texts, and then reconstruct literary texts into historical objects. New historicists represented by Hayden White arbitrarily generalize and strengthen the concept of literariness, and include and amplify "literariness" from the narrow sense of "literary nature" of literature to the "literary nature" of history. The historical narrative endowed with literary qualities becomes a textual construction of history, relying on fiction and imagination at the linguistic level to exert its constructive function and realize self-shaping in the historical field.

New Historicism is essentially a textual historicism, a historicism of language texts and cultural texts that are fictitiously, imaginatively or metaphorically linked to history, and is an obviously critical , the dismantling and subversive character of postmodernist historicism. Some new historicists believe that the objectivity, authenticity and regularity of history do not exist. The so-called "original face" of history is nothing but the product of the author's self-shaping of historical concepts, and the result of ideology's selection, weaving, interpretation and reshaping of dusty and dead historical materials. As Hayden White believes, all history is just "text about history", and all historical text is just a "rhetorical imagination". History only exists in literary historical texts. "History is an extended text, and text is a compressed history. History and text constitute a metaphor of the living world. Text is a historical text, and it is also a text that unifies diachrony and time." [2] Poststructuralism Derrida, the leading figure, asserted: "There is nothing outside the text." Jameson believed that "history can only be approached in the form of text. In other words, history can only be approached through pre-text." [3] All social history does not exist outside the text. On the contrary, all social history is built into the structure of the text. As an anti-historical historian, Foucault openly declared that he wrote history (text) precisely to eliminate history (existence). The "cultural materialism" represented by Williams emphasizes that priority should be given to the cultural aspect of social structure. In order to oppose the textual autonomy theory, it is proposed that Marx's "historical materialism" must be revised. Fukuyama's theory about the "end of history" has plunged people into confusion and sorrow. Philosopher Karl Popper's essay "The Poverty of Historicism" openly opposed Marxist historical determinism. He believes that history is open and there is never any inevitable outcome.

This philosopher's interpretation of the entanglement and interaction of various factors in the process of historical development has certain ideas for understanding the extreme complexity and unexpected twists, ambiguities, and contingency of historical existence and historical development. Enlightenment, but he rejects the overall law of historical development and opposes the decisive role of history in the final analysis, which is obviously incorrect. Some people reduce historical materialism to a linear view of development based on this, which is also inconsistent with the spiritual essence and original meaning of Marxist historical theory.

As a rebellion against formalist literary theory, New Historicism also absorbs and utilizes the coding function of language symbols that formalist literary theory attaches importance to, and emphasizes the interaction between text and history from the overall ideological intention. Literary connection brings literature back to history, expands and explores the imaginative and fictional relationship between language structure and historical structure, and reflects the historical spirit of the text to a certain extent. New historicism combines postmodernism with cultural studies and cultural criticism, showing a relatively strong political tendency and ideology, promoting the deconstructive function and critical spirit of literature, and objectively helping to inspire people to observe from a political perspective History and reality can help cultivate the public's critical spirit and awareness of change against unreasonable systems and ideas. However, various concepts of new historicism have the same theoretical misunderstandings.

1? The theory of intertextuality

The intertextuality theory of new historicism shifts from the intertextuality between literary texts to the interaction between literary texts and historical texts. Literary nature emphasizes the historical nature of literature and the literary nature of history.

First of all, it needs to be pointed out that the relationship between literature and literature, and between literature and history, cannot be completely summarized as intertextuality. In addition to similarities and commensurability, the relationship between different forms of texts , there are still differences and contradictions. Moreover, this intertextual relationship between literature and history is only an imaginative and fictional relationship. The intertextual relationship between literature and history is premised on turning history into written texts. In other words, the intertextual relationship between literature and history does not refer to the relationship between literature and objectively real historical facts. , but the relationship between literature and history presented in the form of text. The theory of intertextuality promoted by New Historicism is like a magic carpet, turning history into text, turning historical facts into history books, turning historical content into the language structure of the text, and turning the objective existence of history into history. Stories have become subjective narratives of historical existence, and have become the interpretation and interpretation of written historical texts from the political and ideological perspectives, and then the dissolution, rewriting and interpretation of real historical events, characters and processes. Reinvention. This kind of magic of intertextuality staged through language structure and text form creates a kind of cover-up in academic cloak, covering up and obscuring the most basic fact, that is, the objective existence of history itself. No matter how literary imagination, fiction, and the deconstructive functions of language symbols are used, there is no primary historical existence inside or outside the text. No matter how the New Historicists interpret, interpret, rewrite, and reshape history. The text form does not mean any substantial changes to the actual historical facts, historical processes and historical laws. Deliberately confusing the boundaries between history and text, and using historical text forms to impersonate, replace and steal history is exactly the crux of the new historicist text theory with postmodernist characteristics.

The so-called assertion that "there is nothing outside the text", the so-called assertion that "history is just a rhetorical imagination", the so-called assertion that "history is an extended text and the text is a compressed history", The so-called assertion that "history and text constitute a metaphor for the living world" and the assertion that "history can only be approached in the form of text" all turn real-life history into literary fiction, linguistic metaphor and rhetorical imagination, and then reposition it. Put it in the text and create the history in the text. Some scholars of New Historicism and Postmodernism who are full of romantic feelings believe that by rewriting historical texts, history itself, especially the social and political system, can be transformed. This is nothing more than a naive fantasy. Historians can tamper with textual records and narratives of history, but history, as a relic of the past, can only disappear in the minds and imaginations of scholars and cannot be objectively eliminated. Some scholars, such as the American Richard Lehane, have noticed the "theoretical limitations" of New Historicism. He is clearly aware that it is actually very difficult to dissolve history.

Because "historical mode" is an indispensable thinking dimension for human beings to understand things, understand their essence, and read texts. Without historical awareness, the grasp of the outside world will fall into chaos and fragmentation, thereby losing a clear understanding of history.

It needs to be further pointed out that the text form of history is not limited to the text form of words. In addition, there are also the text form of cultural relics and utensils and the text form of institutions and institutions. Institutions and institutional text forms have been historically continued and accumulated, and will not be easily dispelled and subverted by the interpretation of historical texts. As for the rewriting of historical cultural relics and artifact texts through historical written texts, it is almost impossible. On the contrary, the discovery of new cultural relics and new artifacts is the authoritative basis for reshaping and changing the form of historical written texts. In the face of new historical discoveries, the established written records and language narratives of history are feeble. Facts speak louder than words. In this sense, newly discovered historical facts are more qualified to play the role of rewriting historical texts, while the text games of new historicism and postmodernism will fall into a very embarrassing and embarrassing situation.

2? From the perspective of the relationship between the objective regularity of history and ideology

New historicism highlights the ideological and political tendencies of historical texts. The emphasis on this issue makes sense. In particular, official history scribes are often driven by the power and interests of those in power, and often give biased or even distorted descriptions of historical figures, events and processes, causing contradictions and contradictions between the text form of history and the historical facts themselves. Contrast. The deep motivations of power and interests that influence people's historical behavior cannot be underestimated. Marx once said: "This interest is so powerful that it successfully conquered Marat's pen, the guillotine of the Terrorist Party, Napoleon's sword, as well as the cross of the church and the pure blood of the Bourbon dynasty." [4] Therefore, Fully taking into account the role of power, interests, ideology and political tendency in writing or rewriting history is very helpful for treating history correctly. However, no matter how full of political tendencies and ideological demands the historical behaviors of individuals and groups are, at least they cannot completely violate the overall laws of historical development. On the contrary, it is often because their interests and desires are generally in line with the world and the people that they can achieve the expected goals. . The power, interests, political tendencies and ideologies of the advanced classes, forces and groups that represent the direction of historical development often show unity and consistency with the objective laws of historical development.

3? From the perspective of the relationship between the objective regularity of historical development and human subjective initiative

New historicism with postmodernist characteristics emphasizes the intertextuality of literature and history. , advocates the intervention of the subject into history, the intervention of the subject in history and the rewriting of history by the subject. There are several situations shown here: First, for historical facts that have passed, the subject can only face its existence. For objects that have not yet been recognized or acquainted, it is impossible to find and construct the intertextuality between literature and history. Sexual relations, and there is no way to use the subject's fictional and imaginative abilities on objects, make metaphorical references, interpret, rewrite and reshape them; secondly, for people engaged in historical activities, only the subject's subjective initiative obeys and Only by mastering the objective regularity of history can we achieve our own purpose; thirdly, the writing subject's description of historical themes should be as loyal to historical reality as possible, and we must not arbitrarily subjectify, humanize, moralize, emotion and will the history. Fourth, in the face of historical texts written with language forms and symbols, the subjective initiative of the subject of interpretation and interpretation is manifested in that it can rewrite and recreate according to its own understanding, and it will certainly reveal its own likes, dislikes, and likes. The key to emotional attitude lies in whether to adopt a serious scientific attitude and correct value standards.

4? From the perspective of the relationship between *** tense and diachronic tense in history and historical texts

Time and space are the forms of existence of things. Spaceless time and timeless time The spaces are incredible. It is also inappropriate to temporalize space and spatialize time. New historicism with the characteristics of postmodernism spatializes time, ignores the uneven development of different countries, nations and regions in economic, political and cultural aspects, and collages, weaves and deconstructs history at will, instead of Paying attention to the diversity and heterogeneity of historical facts themselves, and only focusing on the meaning generation and meaning structure implicit in the works, facilitates the so-called "fiction of fiction" between texts.

This textualist view of history eliminates the depth and meaning of history by emphasizing the non-central paradigm of structure and the concept of temporality, and focuses on the "intertextuality" relationship of mutual reference of texts, thereby cutting off the continuity of history. Transform history into a unique discourse model and generate a logical universal meaning. Replace diachrony with temporality, replace depth with flatness, replace continuity with fragmentation, replace authenticity with metaphor, and use montage techniques to arbitrarily fictionalize, weave and reshape history, leaving people at a loss as to what to do. This kind of history that spatializes time makes history become ahistoricized history. This kind of history in the highest tense subverts and disintegrates the true meaning of different historical facts in different historical stages, triggering a tendency to subjectively determine the meaning of history.

Historical time cannot be traced back or rolled back. Truth is concrete. Historical narratives that do not consider time will inevitably lead to misalignments and fallacies in the interpretation and interpretation of historical and literary texts. Historical principles and standards are important criteria for weighing and judging literary and artistic works. Everything exists in a specific era environment and historical context. Only by placing the cognitive judgment and value evaluation of the narrative object under specific historical conditions, historical scope and historical process can we make a proper understanding and grasp. We cannot interpret today's creations from the perspective of the past, nor can we evaluate literary phenomena in history from the perspective of the present.

Although the "rewriting literary history" movement launched in the 1980s and 1990s was meaningful and fruitful on the whole, it was influenced to a certain extent by the social and cultural trends of New Historicism. Influence. Due to the differences in historical missions and mainstream ideologies, the evaluations of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Shen Congwen, and Lin Yutang will naturally show great differences. In the early 20th century, China's New Culture Movement was in the ascendant, the national democratic liberation movement was surging, and the Enlightenment and National Salvation Movement became the mainstream. Lu Xun and Mao Dun became the standard bearers and generals of the New Culture Movement. Naturally, Shen Congwen and Lin Yutang, who advocated aesthetics and leisure, could not be prominent. After the founding of New China, with the changes of the times and historical turning points, people's aesthetic tastes have become increasingly rich and diverse. Under such historical conditions and cultural background, it is completely normal for academic circles to begin to pay attention to Shen Congwen and Lin Yutang, and to affirm and praise their works that highlight aesthetic characteristics as a literary style. However, we should not belittle Lu Xun and Mao Dun by elevating Shen Congwen and Lin Yutang, or even ridicule Lu Xun and Mao Dun for being "lonely after death." This is exactly the misunderstanding caused by modernizing the historical space of Chinese modern and contemporary literature.