The urban subject in the literary imagination of twentieth century China

The aim of this dissertation is to examine twentieth-century Chinese urban fiction in relation to cultural debates on geopoetics, in order to reassess post-Mao valuations of the city. My inquiry into the urban "subject" encompasses its connotations of motif, subjectivity, and citizen. Urban fiction and debates about the cultural effects of the city ultimately converge in their focus on ethical issues. Morally loaded questions first posed in relation to collective identity shift to private constructions of meaning at century's end, as the city becomes interrogated in relation to subjectivity and the public sphere. Yet in an ironic reversal, the city, previously a foil for national authenticity, now serves to validate Chinese cultural essence, as the urban-rural dichotomy becomes reconfigured in an age of globalization.; I contend that 1990s fiction conveys an urban sensibility unprecedented in China's literary history. Antithetical topological configurations are first countered in late 1980s avant-garde fiction, which adopts hybrid signifiers to redefine cultural discourse. In 1990s fiction, subjective individual experience further displaces national allegories, as the literary imagination becomes dominated by cultural codes of the metropolis 1990s urban fiction explores the city as subject, production of subjectivity in urban social space, and the subject's civic responsibility in a post-revolutionary, market society.; I first trace the development of the city and its literary depictions from antiquity through the twentieth century. Multiple urban connotations inform Republican Era debates between the Shanghai and Beijing Schools, which I compare to contemporary debates over the loss of "humanist spirit" in "new state of affairs" urban fiction. Subsequently, I discuss the transitional cultural logic provoking the desecration of topological distinctions in Su Tong's avant-garde fiction. Finally, I analyze 1990s fiction in which the urban subject is posited against the global rather than the rural topos: ambivalent articulations of metropolitan essence in works by Wang Anyi and Qiu Huadong, melancholic subject formation in novels by Sun Ganlu and Chen Ran, and interrogation of the moral logic of the marketplace in fiction by Qiu Huadong, Zhu Wen, and He Dun.