谭恩美是当代著名的华裔作家之一。作为第二代华裔，她同时受到美国文化和中国文化的影响，这样特殊的文化身份和生存体验让谭恩美以独特的视角塑造她的小说。因此，自我身份的危机与追寻也常常是谭恩美作品中的主题之一。
在谭恩美的第四部小说《接骨师之女》中，自我身份的迷失与塑造依然清晰可见。该小说在虚构的文本中展示了一家三代女性在不同时代的命运故事，特别是母亲路玲，作为第一代华裔移民；女儿，露丝，生于美国、长于美国的华裔后代，她们在两种文化的影响下，遭遇了由于身份问题引起的种种危机。
虽然有研究者对《接骨师之女》中的身份问题进行过探讨，但是鲜有研究从新历史主义的视角对其身份问题进行研究。新历史主义消解了文学与历史的二元对立，将其关注点从大写的历史聚焦于边缘人物经历的“小历史”，从对历史现象的解释转移到了对人的身体和主体的研究。本文试图从新历史主义的视角，主要是斯蒂芬﹒格林布拉特的自我塑形理论出发，探讨了处于两种文化影响下的母女二人的自我身份构建过程。该论文基于新历史主义的主张-----通过将文学文本与其他文本共读，将边缘化的人物放入文学与历史的对话中，探讨了各种影响自我塑形的因素，最终得出了以下结论：自我塑形是受到各种制约力量影响的、复杂的过程；不存在完全自由的、不受约束的主体；主体是一种文化的产物，是各种权利关系的产物。
本论文共分六章。第一章简要介绍了本研究的背景与意义，作者与作品，以及国内外对该作品的研究状况。第二章为研究的理论基础部分，在该部分对新历史主义以及自我塑形理论进行了介绍。第三章从自我塑形的内在意识----露丝对自我身份的矛盾心理和路玲表面看来自我身份的丧失分析两位主人公的内在的塑形因素。第四章则从外在的塑形力量进一步探讨对她们的自我产生影响的塑造因素。第五章讨论了母女二人最终的协和策略，即母亲通过书写展示出来真实的自我；而女儿则通过阅读母亲的文字，完成了她的自我塑形。第六章是本文的结论部分。

amy tan is one of the most famous contemporary chinese american writers. as a second generation of chinese american, she has been influenced by both american and chinese cultures. it is her particular cultural identity and life experiences that make amy tan form a unique way in creating her novels with the identity crisis and the quest for self as the main themes of her works.
the loss and construction of self-identity are explicitly revealed in the bonesetter’s daughter, amy tan’s fourth novel. the bonesetter’s daughter unfolds a historical picture of an immigrant family through narrating the stories of its three generations, especially of luling and her daughter ruth, who are influenced by bi-culture and met with crises caused by their identity problems. luling represents the first generation of chinese american immigrants and ruth the descendant who was born and brought up in the united states. 
although some researchers have studied the identity issue in the bonesetter’s daughter, almost no study is available to have made research from the perspective of new historicism. new historicism breaks the boundary between literature and history, and puts literary texts into the large cultural context. meanwhile, new historicists shift their attention from the grand history narration to the marginalized individual histories, also from the materialist explanation of historical phenomena to the investigation of the history of the human body and the human subject as well. mainly based on the self-fashioning theory of the new historicist, stephen greenblatt, this thesis attempts to make an exploration of the self-fashioning processes of luling and ruth. by taking both literary and non-literary texts as the s of study, which is the proposition of new historicism, putting marginalized protagonists into the dialogue between literary text and history, and discussing various shaping forces functioned in the self-fashioning, this thesis draws conclusions that the self-fashioning is quite complex process which is constrained by many shaping forces, and  there is no pure, unfettered subject, and that human subject is a product of culture and the relation of power. 
there are six chapters in this thesis. chapter one illustrates the research background and significance, gives an introduction to amy tan and the bonesetter’s daughter, and reviews the relevant studies. chapter two introduces the related theory of new historicism. chapter three concentrates on two protagonists’ inner awareness for self, focusing on ruth’s ambivalence of self-identity and luling’s latent identity. chapter four discusses the outside shaping forces which influence the protagonists’ self-fashioning. chapter five probes into the negotiation strategies which luling and ruth adopted so as to complete their final self-fashioning. the last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis.