英语论文网

本文是一篇英语语言学论文，笔者认为互文性是这部小说最突出的创作特点，怀特黑德对历史文本和文学互文的广泛引用证明了这一点。在《地下铁路》（The Underground Railroad）一书中，怀特黑德搜索了非裔美国人历史上的重大事件，并将其作为历史文本纳入小说背景，从而构建了文本的历史相关性。

Chapter One Introduction

1.1  Colson Whitehead and His Literary Writings

Colson Whitehead (1969–) is a major figure in contemporary American literature as an African-American writer. Whitehead has authored eight novels and two nonfiction works to date. Whitehead’s sixth novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), is a masterful synthesis of historical fiction, slave narratives, bildungsroman, science fiction, and other literary genres. Once published, the novel was initially recommended by Oprah for her Book Club, then on Barack Obama’s summer vacation reading list. The Underground Railroad has not only become Books of the Year of The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications, but also won the National Book Award (2016) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2017), becoming the first work to win both American heavyweight literary awards since 1991. In May 2021, TV series of the same name was released on Amazon Prime all season at one time, garnering positive media attention and demonstrating the novel’s incredible appeal.

As a modern African-American writer, Whitehead is cognizant of the fact that racial problems persist and have become more complicated in light of contemporary historical circumstances. This acknowledgment stems from his education and personal experiences as an African-American. Since childhood, Whitehead has gotten an excellent education, which has enabled him to analyze critically from a higher level. Whitehead is a member of the intellectual elite and hails from a prosperous middle-class black family in New York. Throughout his childhood, he lived on the Upper East Side and studied at the famous Trinity School. Then he went to study at Harvard University from 1987 to 1991 and earned a degree in English literature. Although Whitehead comes from a significantly more affluent family than the majority of Americans, he is undoubtedly discriminated against by some white people due to his African-American origin. Whitehead described his experiences with racial discrimination in an interview with Sean O’Hagan, particularly the arbitrary racist police policy in the United States, which meant “everyone who is black have had that experience” (O’Hagan, 2020). These experiences inspired Whitehead, a new generation of African-American writers, to embrace postmodernism and consider racial issues.

1.2  Literature Review

In general, domestic and abroad scholars have approached Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad from two perspectives: one is to investigate the novel’s themes from various perspectives and theories, and the other is to analyze the author’s unique narrative strategy.

Whitehead’s creative subjects, styles, and literary genres are wide-ranging, and he enjoys breaking traditional narrative formulas. Long before The Underground Railroad was published, Whitehead’s unique writing style had become his specialty and sparked heated debate. Ramón Saldvar (2011), for example, praises Whitehead’s “post-racial” writing style, remarking that his works go beyond postmodern historiographic metafiction, whereas Linda Selzer (2008) observes that Whitehead’s 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。