Anxiety: The Spiritual Phenomenon Of The 1940s Literary Creation Study

The 1940s was an age during which there took place political, economic and cultural transformations. Along with the cultural transformation, the practice of cultural enlightenment and the criticism on traditional cultures confronted new plight. This was the era background of literary creation. Meanwhile, intellectuals began to rethink and reassess how to locate self-value and so cause the spiritual anxiety which was in accord with the transformation of the era. This anxiety surely influenced the textual creation of the intellectuals, was manifested by the texts obviously or obscurely, and became the epitome of that age.By reading and analyzing a large amount of texts concretely and categorizing the themes, the author of this thesis in the first chapter points out that anxiety exists as a spiritual imagination in literary creation. This is shown in the texts from the changes of the intellectual characters who are the subjects of the enlightenment, that is, three tendencies of the characters' weakening and escapes: borderization, mundanization and revolutionization. What's more, part of the texts show tendencies of suspecting and joking with western cultures. What hides behind these phenomena is the outpouring of the intellectuals' anxiety toward cultural beliefs and identification with values.In the second chapter, the author uses households as a typical imagery, from detailed texts, digs out the emotional changes of the traditional cultures in the forties. In the texts of the new cultures , there exists interlaced anxiety concerning evolutional narratives and individual utterances. Therefore, the essential of the spiritual homeward journey and self-existence of the 40s intellectuals can be drawn — rebuild of their thinking.The third chapter analyzes two aesthetic characters which are shown in the tests by anxiety as a spiritual phenomenon: beauty of worry and indignation, and beauty of sadness and grace.