A Study Of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Creative Ideology And His Reception And Influence In China

The fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, has long been known to general readers and literary critics alike. But similar to those American minority writers, he has not obtained enough attention and study matching his great contribution to the 20^th century literary world. In addition to the obstruction by various critical theories respectively prevalent for a time in the 20^th century, there has been no systematic and comprehensive monograph focusing on Singer's creative ideology, or his philosophical and religious thinking. Yiddish critics mainly study Singer in a parochial Yiddish literary tradition, while most of the English critics tend to interpret him with what Singer called "false critical theories in our century".His seemingly outdated views on literary creation and his long-time impatience with the critics have left quite a few enigmas and puzzles in Singer study. For instance: Singer wrote in Yiddish but he was more like a misfit among those Yiddish writers; being an American Jewish writer, he was either called the only legitimate practitioner of American Jewish literature or simply excluded from the list of American Jewish writers in some books of literary history; Singer's idealized hero Yasha Mazur (in The Magician of Lublin) has long been read as "rogue" or "Don Juan"...All these paradoxes and puzzles, I think, can only be solved through an thorough study of Singer's creative ideology.The author finds that Singer's literary creation is always under the guidance...