Confusion And Anxiety: Travel In The Late Qing Novels

Travel is an important aspect of ancient Chinese literati’s lives. It also plays a significant role in shaping Chinese literati’s spiritual outlook. From chivalric tour in The Water Margin to pilgrimage in The Journey to the West, from travel for official examinations in Caizi-jiaren Novel to Jinghua yuan’s [Flowers in the mirror] travel in the unreal lands, travel not only shapes personalities of characters and drives the deployment of fiction’s plots,but also affects fiction’s textual structure and narrative mode deeply. In late Qing period, travel narrative prevailed in fiction. For example,Expose fiction like Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang [Eyewitness reports on strange things from the past twenty years] and Lengyanguan [Observations of an indifferent eye], Utopian fiction like Chiren shuomengji [The story of a fool] and Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo [The moon colony], science fantasy like Xin Faluo xiansheng tan [A new account of Mr. Windbag], all of them took travelers as the hero, and took their travel as the storyline of the fiction.This thesis tries to figure out travel’s function in late Qing fiction. The thesis includes four chapters. Chapter one try to finger out why travel narrative thrive in late Qing fiction. In late Qing period, China was experiencing unprecedented transition.Travel narrative offered a good perspective either for exposing strange things, or seeking remedy from foreign countries. The introduction of foreign fiction also benefited the prevalence of travel narrative in late Qing fiction. Chapter two analyzes three elements of travel in late Qing fiction, including driving forces, subjects and vehicles. The driving forces influences the travelers’ anticipation of the journey and the shapes of traveling space. As the subject of travel, traveler is not only the core character of the fiction, and the shaping of its subjectivity also provides us a channel to observe the author’s thoughts and minds. The introduction modern vehicles, such as trains and steamships, had a deep influence on travel narrative. Besides providing narrative space and driving force of plot, modern vehicles were also the carrier of the culture which is heterogeneous from traditional Chinese culture, reflecting the conflicts between Chinese and western culture. Chapter three focus on narrative change brought by travel writing, which is associated with narrative person and perspective closely. As for narrative time, late Qing fiction showed new concept of time by focusing on the present.Chapter four analyzes the writing about traveling space and the feature of narrative space. The essence of travel is move in the space.Without space, travel will not exist. Either real ones or unreal ones, traveling space in late Qing fiction bears on cultural connotation. Besides traveling space, the spatial form in discourse space is also worth to note. In some late Qing fictions, unlike former traditional fiction, the series stories which connect with each other by the travel of heroes not for causality, but for a same theme. Thus, these fictions form a narrative spatial form like modern western fiction, showing a scroll painting about contemporary Chinese social status quo in discourse space.