Studies Of Squire Writing In Modern Literature

The squires were a group of local elites,which were deeply moulded by the imperial civil service system and Confucian culture.They live in clusters and follow the old customs of the feudal era in their lives,production and operation,moral choices and interpersonal relationships.In the history of modern literature,the image of the squires is an existence that is hard to ignore.Because of its inseparable relationship with traditional culture,enlightenment and revolutionary culture,the image of the squire has always faced the dilemma of "instrumentalisation" in different stages of history.Especially in the last decade or so,researchers have tried to use the image of the squire as a pivot point to pry the cultural study of Chinese literature in the past hundred years,in order to bridge the several ruptures in the narrative of literary history.This endeavour certainly represents the direction of current squire studies,but it makes the already complex discourse field even more noisy.Therefore,this paper takes the writing of the squire in modern literary history as the object of study,explores the construction of the image of the squire by writers in modern literature,and also hopes to open up the possibility of observing the squire from a cultural perspective.In the May Fourth era,the squires,as products of the ancient Chinese imperial civil service system,were placed at the back of the Age of Enlightenment,leaving behind the figure of the sadly fallen or the image of the wryly humorous,sinister and ruthless.However,the May Fourth writers soon discovered that the problem of the squire inherited from the late Qing to the Xinhai had not been solved,and that the squire’s network of relationships was more complex than they had imagined.Thus,in the era of the Revolution,in order to establish a top-down modern political system,the relationship network of the squires,the "small sovereigns",was pushed to the forefront,and the bad gentry became the target of everyone’s punishment.However,the failure of the Revolution reminds people that the influence of the squires in the texture of vernacular culture is difficult to erase,although this influence is slowly declining,and the squire culture shows a discursive orientation that is both hardy and tattered.Against the backdrop of the decline of the gentry group,which no longer constitutes a major threat,many works have appeared in which the image of the virtuous gentry is written,which contain many writers’ positive feelings towards the gentry group,and their overall thinking about the cultural system that this group relies on for survival,and their attempts to extract from it the cultural factors that are favourable to the survival of the Chinese nation,which is also appropriate to the background of the time when the "Neo-Confucianism" has taken place.This also fits the background of the time when "Neo-Confucianism" took place.In the 1940 s,due to the advancement of modern politics and the withering of the countryside,the village squires almost existed in name only,and the "profit-making brokers" fostered by the grass-roots government adopted the governance mode of the village squires,"borrowing the body and returning to the soul",and seized the townspeople frantically.In the liberated areas,the Party’s grass-roots cadres tried to understand the squires from the perspective of the "enlightened gentry," but the clash between the two ways of thinking fundamentally reflected the conflict between the "new man" and the "old man.The conflict between the two ways of thinking fundamentally reflected the conflict between the "new man" and the "old man".Therefore,in the liberated areas of the Northeast,the writing of the "landlord’s family history" in the form of literary hierarchy became the starting point for the image of the landlord in contemporary literature.The literary discourse of the squire has evolved several times,and although it tends to be simplified in the end,the process suggests the complexity of the squire as a literary and cultural phenomenon.Only by restoring the discourse of the squire to the context of the times can we better adjust the historical mentality of today’s squire studies.