用小说建构历史:《神圣的渴望》中的奴隶贸易书写

The Construction of History by Fiction:On the Writing of Slave Trade in Sacred Hunger

当代英国小说家巴里·昂斯沃斯的《神圣的渴望》以令人振奋的航海大冒险,性格鲜明的人物群像将读者带入18世纪邪恶贪婪的奴隶贸易历史中。本文关注小说中奴隶贸易的书写,结合文学文本的细读与社会历史语境的研究,运用新历史主义理论挖掘小说文本的深层结构和隐喻系统,探究奴隶贸易幽深的政治和经济渊源,揭示其隐含的英国与非洲和美洲进行大西洋奴隶贸易关系的真相,分析小说的文本历史性和历史文本性,以及大写历史小写化等特征。昂斯沃斯在小说中突出历史与文学的交融与互释,以当代的眼光完成了对文本再现历史的想象和反讽,以虚构文本丰富了新历史主义的探索形式。

Contemporary novelist,Barry Unsworth’Sacred Hunger takes readers into evil greedy slave trade in 18th century by exciting adventures in sailing and vivid characterization.The paper focus on the writing of the slave trade in the novel,combining a close reading of the text with the study of social and historical context,and using the new-historical theory to probe into the deep structure and the metaphor system of the novel,to explore the political and economic origins of the slave trade,to reveal the underlying truth of Britain's the Atlantic slave trade relations with Africa and the Americas,and to analyze historicity of texts and textuality of history.The paper believes that Unsworth emphasizes the mergence and clarification between history and literature in the novel,manages to make the imagination and the irony of history reappear through the text from the perspective of contemporary era,and enriches new historicism of exploration with the fictional text.