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There are also some other critics who examine the novel from the angle of literary regionalism. Based on the notion of Henry James’ connectedness and self-conscious interaction with places of the visible world, Gary Davenport gropes Welch’s thematic use of Montana location as “the most effective and memorable” (323) aspect of his novel and its functions in providing Sylvester identity, “covering link with Sylvester’s culturally problematical past” (323). The book is accounted by Davenport as being well written and neatly tailored to Welch’s thematic concerns except adding too many metaphorical uses of the landscape to the theme of injustice in white-Indian relations, as “a serious topic not always serious served by a serious book” (327).
Still, some other researches are focused mainly on the theme of identity. For example, Darin Saul tries to probe “the intercultural identity” in The Indian Lawyer and Fools Crow based on James Clifford’s intercultural identity theory. He holds that characters in both novels create their identity and asset their inpidual autonomy through improvising and appropriating from both Blackfeet and white cultures. He also puts that, in The Indian Lawyer, culture is depicted in the process of “adapting and falling to adapt” (522) and stronger possibilities are inherent in the provisional identity as Sylvester forges a new identity, a hybrid that is “fashioned by multiple influences” (524) but chooses his own path. However, he holds that Sylvester’s Indianess is formed as “he adapts and makes his way in the world” (523) against some “codified view of Indianess” (523), namely the fixed view on Indians as “drunks and failures” (523) and “a nostalgic view of an essentialized Indian identity” (524).
Inspired by the above studies, this thesis comes up with something more: after so many situations and the sudden fall in Sylvester’s life, is there any change in the main character’s understanding about himself? If so, what is the stimulus that leads him to change his understanding? What inspires James Welch to write about the conflicts of an Indian lawyer and the white prisoner? And what is hidden behind the conflict? Is this novel greatly influenced by history? Does it in return have some impacts on the history? All these questions distinguish themselves from former studies by a special focus on the historical value of The Indian Lawyer and the self-construction of its main character.
Born at the turn of 1980s, the term “New Historicism” is known as a kind of literary criticism. It originates from Stephen Greenblatt’s article in Genre “The Form of Power and The Power of Forms in Renaissance” (Shi and Wang i), opening a new facet of literary criticism against textual ontology.
New historicists break the fixed cause-and-effect relationship between history and text. They treat works of art as a kind of “currency”, a product from a set of manipulations, namely, the “negotiation” between subject and contextual history. Hence the text functions not only as an outcome but also a participant of history. Louis A. Montrose describes the relation between text and history in a dictum “the historicity of texts and the textuality of the history” (20).
What’s more, another important concept put forward by New Historicism is “self-fashioning”. New historicists believe that the self-fashioning process of human subject is by nature unfree. So do the literary symbols in the text, most of which are in constant conflicts with their surroundings (Zhu 389). Stephen Greenblatt concludes, in his study of Shakespeare’s Literary figures, that
Self-fashioninginvolves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self--God, a sacred book, an institution a such as church court, colonial or military administration. (9)