塑造与消解:对“文学牛仔”英雄形象的历史解读

Shaping and Dissolving:A Historical Interpretation of the Hero Image of “Literary Cowboys”

“文学牛仔”的英雄形象从出现到确立再到呈现出一种消解的趋势,在牛仔小说发展史上是一个渐变的历史过程。19世纪60年代,美国西部大平原地区“牧牛王国”的崛起为小说家提供了美国文学本土化的新素材,“文学牛仔”在传奇冒险故事中登场并随“一角钱丛书”的流行初具英雄形象。随著20世纪初美国西部踏上工业化和城市化的进程,“文学牛仔”被牛仔小说家刻画成阳刚威猛、热爱自由、神勇无畏和开拓进取的骑士英雄。20世纪后半期,美国社会与文化中的后现代主义思潮使“文学牛仔”的英雄神话开始解构,其英雄形象的消解反映了牧区社会衰落时牛仔作为社会边缘人的命运。

The heroic image of “literary cowboy” is a gradual historical process in the history of cowboy fiction. In the 1960s, the rise of the “Cattle Kingdom”in the Great Plains provided novelists with new materials for the localization of American literature. The “literary cowboy” appeared in legendary adventure stories and began to become a hero with the popularity of the “Dime Series”, With the industrialization and urbanization of the western United States in the early 20th century,“literary cowboy” was portrayed by cowboy novelists as a powerful, free-loving, fearless and pioneering knight hero. The post-modernism trend of thought in American society and culture in the latter half of the 20th century began to deconstruct the heroic myth of “literary cowboy”. The disappearance of its heroic image reflected the fate of cowhoy as a marginal person in the decline of pastoral society.