Difficult Exploration

With its reform and opening up, China enjoys the great benefit of its economic development and its social formation has also changed greatly. The market economy affects people's values, and then causes the change of them. In this situation, writers begin to think about how to develop the traditional local culture to modernization. In the pursuit of modern local culture, the ways they think are different because of the differences of age, economy and culture.In nowadays local literature, writers express their mental complexity and contradiction about the ways to build up modern local culture by describing the intellectuals'transmutation of confusion, hesitation, choice, abandoning, and persistence.This thesis is about to explore writers'ideas in the course of conversion of traditional local culture to modern local culture by studying the image of rural intellectuals in the local literature of new period. They think that the main tasks of local literature are different in 80s,90s and New Age.In 80s, they mostly thought about the conversion of traditional local culture to modern local culture. Shaping the figures of rural intellectuals, writers presented their ideas about the complexity of local culture conversion. In 90s, shaping the figures of rural intellectuals who stick to the traditional morality, they began to reflect the problems of modern local culture, return to the traditional, save the lost local spiritual culture. It was also complex in the exploration of return. In the new age, facing the remaining issues of 80s and 90s, they explore how to construct a way to the new local culture. The rural intellectuals in their works make great effort to construct the local culture with modern material civilization and traditional humanistic spirit, or pass on the traditional local culture. However, writers don't reach their ideal destination.On the way of exploring the modern local culture, some intellectuals in writers' works neglect the mental crisis, survival pressure, environmental pollution and so on in the progress of modern civilization, or the corrupt practice of the traditional local culture. The rural intellectuals'journey of struggling shows difficult exploration of modern local culture, which not only has special literary values but also profound historical values.