Landscapes of the soul: Essays of place and Chinese literary modernity, 1920--1945

This dissertation is a study of modern Chinese "essays of place" written between 1920 and 1945. It makes two principal arguments---first, that these essays constitute an analytically identifiable yet largely unexplored sub-genre of modern Chinese essays and, second, that essays of place are complex modern literary texts that are critical to any comprehensive understanding of Chinese literary modernity.; The conceptual approach focuses on the significance of the relationship between place perception and identity formation in discussing and evaluating essays of place and their role as modern texts. Memory, both personal and cultural, plays a major role in this approach, as a faculty through which the traveling writer makes and remakes places and their significance in mind and text. Through this approach, various subtexts in these essays can be seen clearly, revealing a distinct and pervasive fictional quality and other literary complexities obscured by prevailing scholarship.; The core of the study analyzes essays primarily by Shen Congwen, He Qifang, Li Guangtian, Ai Wu, Yu Dafu, Feng Zhi, Zhu Ziqing, and Fang Lingru, and identifies four primary essay modes. Essays of the first mode (visits to famous places and historic sites) focus on the use of "traditional gestures" which seek to, but cannot, confirm the writer's identity and authority. In essays of the second mode (journeys home), the author is stymied by manifestations of exile. Essays of the third mode (journeys to peripheral places) reveal the figurative nature of unfamiliar places in the author's attempt to cope with a nation in crisis. In essays of the fourth mode (essays embodying stories), we see the fictionalization of essays in its most overt state.; In each mode, at least three recurring elements question the supposed authority of authors to confirm and describe issues of identity: encounters with people inhabiting the places; aspects of incompletion and ambiguity; and self-referential strategies. The study ultimately demonstrates that modern Chinese essays of place constitute a search for, rather than a determination or confirmation of, meaning and identity.