Back to the Past : A New Historicist Reading of American Romances by Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Morrison

This study proposes to examine the historical romances of the genuinely American major novelists: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, and Paradise by Toni Morrison through the perspective of New Historicism and to investigate their contribution to the historical romance genre with which they experiment in and out of tradition in order to convey the immanent truth of their times as an amalgam of past, present, and future. These romances weaved by the authors' re-imagination of the past fundamentally fictionalize communities founded upon the utopian longings to create an ideal society. With the new historicist reading of the selected works proper to the genre, this study also aims to illuminate how they invite the contemporary and future engagement of the readers to actively reimagine and reconstruct a piece of history in a way that sheds light on the broader scope of national history. Consequently, we can find that these writers have attempted to use the past as a still evolving and transformative entity and modify external reality to highlight the force of the past as vividly alive within the works, remaining faithful and true to the fundamental facts of history in the process of aesthetic fictionalization.