Writing between tradition and the West: Chinese modernist fiction, 1917-1937

This dissertation is a historical account and critical analysis of Chinese modernist fiction from 1917 to 1937. I maintain that a discussion of modernism in Chinese literature requires due attention paid to the specific cultural context of the time, with consideration as well of the ways the writers themselves envisioned their modernism.; The three main variables that affected the modernity of the literary works involved were tradition, the "Western connection," and the "Japan connection." The writers negotiated these three variables in different ways, a task complicated by their contradictory enthusiasm towards both internationalism and nationalism. During the May Fourth era, tradition was generally negated and posited as the opposite to modernity, mainly understood as a Western product. Literary modernity was seen as synecdochic to progressive political and technological forms which they eagerly sought to import from the West for the betterment of their country. Befitting their instrumental orientation towards Western knowledge, they understood modernism to be more or less a set of literary techniques for their use.; The Beijing modernists of the next decade (1927-1937), however, reacted precisely against this lop-sided anti-traditional outlook of the May Fourth and asserted a syncretic aesthetics. By re-interpreting tradition via modern Western aesthetics, they re-inscribed aspects of tradition as having modernist characteristics. The Shanghai modernists of the same decade departed both from their May Fourth predecessors and their Beijing counterparts by self-consciously constructing a literary modernism out of the urban milieu of Shanghai. It appeared to them that if they donned the gestures of urbanity, such as decadence, exoticism and eroticism, they could create a successful modernist literature. Their fascination with the city's Western material culture notwithstanding, they were also fraught with anxiety over its colonial and imperialistic connotations. This tension created by cultural internationalism and political nationalism informed much of their work. In sum, the two decades of modernist fiction studied here exhibited varying concerns and characteristics that can be most properly understood through a thorough contextualization.