Cultural Power And Artistic Achievement Of "snow Country"

Snow World" is a representative work of the Japanese writer, Kawabata Yatsunari. There have been so many research essays about it in both home and abroad since its publication. This essay attempts to reveal the genuine motive of the author's creation and re-interpret the significance of this work from such two aspects as literature and culture. This is based upon the theoretic gist that literature criticism is a kind of criticism approach that reviews literature phenomenon from cultural perspective and generally studies the cultural nature of literature.Going through the era background of "Snow World", the writer reveals the real aspect of the social living of the time in Japan through his description on the livelihood of common plebeian and women engaged in miserable occupations. The work mainly depicts the humiliated but tough livelihood of a geisha. Cultural Oedipus complex is an important content of Japanese culture and is considered a special part from that of other nations in the world. This essay makes a thorough analysis on the causes of lowlife, especially on women's miserable and unfortunate life in Japan of 1920s and 1930s by presenting the readers the contents about geishas and female veneration in Japanese social culture. The author of this essay points out that the misfortune not only stems from the real social situation of that time, the factor of cultural sources is an important area that should not be neglected as well.This essay is divided into 4 parts.The first part discusses that the emergence of typical circumstance and characters originates from the writer's distinct powers of perception.The second part discusses that the emergence of lively female images is mainly because of national cultural Oedipus complex.The third part tells the readers that the ethics about morality and human feelings in Japanese culture are the norm of Japanese social life, and that is the writer's real source of his creation.The fourth part analyzes the root cause of high artistic achievement and high appraisal the work achieves, which is the profound interpretation on life and creation through artistic processing.