"Aesthetic Of Other Provinces" And "the Cultural Anxiety"

In the 1930s and 1940s, both Li Jieren and Shen Congwen kept considerable independence in their writings and achieved great success in the literature world of China. However, they and their works have experienced the"edge"situation in the earlier history of modern literature.Taking"edge writing"as the perspective, the first chapter of this paper made a thorough comparison of Li Jieren's"The River Trilogy"and Shen Congwen's"Novel of The Western Hunan". Through the detailed and careful analysis of the origin novel text, it presented the great differences between the western Sichuan and the western Hunan, both of which were located at the border area in the south.The second chapter is the main body. It explored the various factors which bought the great difference from three aspects: the self-cultivate preparation and cultural accumulation of the writers, the expectation the writers placed on literature, and the writers'literary attitude towards"central"conversation. Thus, it proved the viewpoint: Li Jieren's self-cultivate preparation and cultural accumulation endowed him with the extraordinary judgment of"aesthetic of other provinces". He considered the edge area as a special cultural form and observed the historical changes of the western Sichuan with transcendent and calm manner. In the"river novel", he displayed the essence and verve of Sichuan culture completely and gave it a kind of special charm. However, for Shen Congwen, his own experiences and the corresponding cultural psychology accumulation stimulated his potential countervailing consciousness. He created an artificial dreamland on his own initiative to combat with the real world, which was actually his anxiety for the culture of"the western Hunan"and the"edge situation". And he turned it into a poetic expression through words.The"aesthetic of other provinces"and the"cultural anxiety"reflected the obvious difference of Li Jieren and Shen Congwen as well as distinguished them from other contemporary writers. It led to such problems: Did they have enough value in the literature history? Whether the two authors'relevant legal status was admitted? The third chapter of this paper tried to have a second thought on these problems through analyzing the complicated clues, recollecting the gains and the loses and considering about the experiences. It aimed at the possible enlightenment for the later literature history writings and the possible help for the new researches on Li Jieren and Shen Congwen.