This study examines the fusion of historical and fictional narratives in six postmodern novels written by American and Chinese woman writers, published in the last decade of the twentieth century or the first decade of the twenty-first century. Each American writer is paired with a Chinese writer to analyze the similarity and difference in their configuration of literary and historical narratives, and also to offer a tentative explanation of the common motifs and the different presentations of ideas.;A common motif that runs through the six novels is "the historian at work." Through their portraits of characters as historians perusing historical archives---not accidently they are all female---, the six writer's works put to the foreground the research and writing processes that conventional historical writing seeks to undermine in the neutral, scientific, language of historical writing.;In addition to the common motif mentioned above, each pair of writers also provides a glimpse into other issues involved in historical writing and its fusion with novelistic discourse. Chapter one examines Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) and Liu Suola's The Stories of the Ji Family (2003) to analyze the infiltration of myth into history. Chapter two discusses Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Shi Shuqing's Hong Kong Trilogy (1992, 1995, 1997). Both writers engage in retelling the history of the colonial conditions of their concern, Native Americans and Hong Kong people. Chapter three analyzes Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and Wang Anyi's Reality and Fiction (1993). They challenge the image of writer in solitude and emphasize their desire for a community through story-telling and writing. Writing, for Kingston and Wang, becomes a strategy to confirm or to consolidate their political, as well as cultural, identity because the communities are formed through their writings.
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