A New Historical Approach to Midnight's Children

摘要

As a representative writer of postcolonial literature, Salman Rushdie gained his reputation for his second novel Midnight's Children, the best Booker Prize winner of all time. The novel is set in the context of actual historical events as with historical fiction. Most critics interpret the novel from the perspective of postcolonialism or postmodernism. Meanwhile, New Historicism provides a new approach to understanding this fiction. Therefore, this paper aims to reveal the relationship between national history and personal experience in Midnight's Children by applying the doctrine of New Historicism, which will be done in two parts. The first part analyzes the Historicity of the book, and the second part explores Textuality of History reflected in the book.