A Comparative Study Between German Romanticism And Chinese Literature

During its acceptances since Late-Qing to "May4th" movement, the Romanticism has been reduced from heteroglossia into a single dimensional interpretative construction which only focused on Love and Revolution. In most versions of the modern Chinese literature histories, this kind of "Romanticism" is often defined as the "positive Romanticism", opposite the "negative Romanticism" which mainly includes the German school. As German Romanticism’s most important themes, the nostalgia to the national tradition and the exploration of the nation mind are excluded from the influence source of the "May4th" literature, although the influence is real, deep and powerful. The obvious misreading at least leads the studies into two gigantic mistakes. It misrepresents and distorts the historical fact of the "May4th" literature, since the German school has always been helping the latter one building its own styles and themes in a more potential and delicate way. And at the meantime, the wrong impression of Romanticism certainly will not help the researchers approaching the complicated cultural diploma and situation, as without rethinking the keywords of nationalism and tradition which origin from the German Romanticism. Trying to understand and reinterpret the "May4th literature and nowadays’cultural conflicts, this thesis takes nationalism and tradition as its central conception to implore both potential and textual influences in the reception and variation of the German Romanticism in Chinese literature from Late-Qing to "May4th". Even today, the diplomas and complexes caused by German Romanticism are still shaping and moulding the way we imagine and define our nation and self identities.The first chapter casts three most important and popular Romantic texts from Late-Qing to "May4th", including Alexandre Dumas, fils’ Camille, Byron’s The Isles of Greece and Lu Xun’s On the Power of Satanical School of Poetry, as cases to restore and discuss their influences to the stylizational romantic impressions of Chinese elites. Camille and Byron (the image from his famous satanical poems) had established the high-estimated value of revolution and freedom in the field of family and society; while Lu Xun’s essay powerfully emphasised the authority of the revolutionary romantic tendency. The "May4th" naturally inherited the literary legacy from Late-Qing, therefore, also considered German Romanticism as the revolutionary one rather than traditional nor mental. The influence of German Romanticism, being separated and alienated from mainstream, however, still stubbornly existed in modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun’s poetry Wild Grass is chosen as a typical case to prove this potential and delicate kind of influence.From the level of horizontal geography, the second chapter tries to focus on the nationalism in modern literature opposite the background of German Romanticism. Since Late-Qing, the images of health and illness had eventually developed into a couple of most popular collective metaphors which implied the power comparison between China and the West. On this issue, almost every political and cultural tendency had its very own idea. But with the sudden national identity swift from greatest empire to a fragile state, the fallen of nation began to be connected with the weakness of private body. A new kind of cultural image raised in the "May4th" literature, namely china as illness and the west as health. The zeitgeist led the Chinese students in Japan and Germany introduce the popular tendency of militarism to China. Although China obviously could not establish a powerful nation like Germany, the idea of connection between private body and collective nation still found its way to profoundly inspired Chinese elites. The "May4th" movement developed an eclectic bodily nationalism out of the military theory, and dreamed this kind of nationalism would lead China into some kind of promised rejuvenation. But on the other hand, the romantic nationalism is essentially against mainstream pursuit, namely cultural cosmopolitanism. And there was always a conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in1920’s optimism just like Feng Zhi wisely suggested in his poetic drama on the river.The last chapter intends to put the argument about national tradition into the background of German Romanticism from the aspect of vertical history. In "May4th" literature, the light and darkness could be considered as another couple of fundamental metaphor. In the rhetoric system, the West signified the bright future, while China the dark past. And to look for the light, the darkness had to be exhaustively abandoned. In the new cultural context, Chinese literature firmly and happily said fair well to the national tradition. The glorious triumph of the modern literature claimed that the "May4th" thinkers made great efforts and successfully re-establish the national cultural identities. However, there is also some kind of strong and profound nostalgia to the long-term tradition in the texts of new writers. To deal with the diploma of national tradition, some "May4th" thinkers, scholars and writers returned to the German Romantic practical and theoretical experiences, namely folklore, medievalism and hermeneutics. In1920s’ China, Zhou Zuoren and Gu Jiegang, trying to renew the tradition, inherited the folklore studies from Herder, A. W. Schlegel and Grimm Brothers. At the mean time, the School of Critical Review(Xue-Heng Magazine) took another path under the influences from both Romanticism(though obscure and veiled) and Irving Babbitt, standing firmly for the fine art tradition and national identity, to fight against the cultural cosmopolitanism. And as the third way to reinterpret national tradition,such as Lu Xun, Guo Moruo and Feng Zhi etc., adopted the classical literary themes and situations into modern poetries and stories, attempting to compromise modernity and tradition by the rhetoric and styles of irony, fragmentation and remenberance.