Search For The Lost Fragments

Shen Congwen was unique in the history of Chinese contemporary literature. In the past thirty years, an unfailing research wave on Shen Congwen has been whipped up in China and overseas by his outstanding achievements in literature and legendary experiences from a young soldier with elementary school diploma to a professor and from a layman who did not even know what the interpunction was to a literary master having the title"stylist". Shen Congwen collected material from the daily life in western Hunan for many of his works and constructed a real and visional world of western Hunan by vivid folk custom scenes, which has become a typical symbol of regional cultures like American Faulkner's"Yoknapatawpha"family and British Hardy's rural world.There were two kinds of folk custom scenes quite distinct from each other in Shen Congwen's works, namely colorful and poetic western Hunan and heavy and real modern western Hunan. Folk custom scenes were the portraits of the history and reality of western Hunan and the background in which the charaters in his works lived. It is more important that these folk custom scenes as the products filtered by art possessed certain narrative characteristics and aesthetic functions, supported the intrinsic structure of his works and were closely connected with Shen Congwen's cultural standpoint and ideals.Based on the evolution of the folk customs in western Hunan described in Shen Congwen's works, in this dissertation the present author tries to reveal the beauty, profundity, vividness and heaviness of these folk customs by text reading from the viewpoint of folk aesthetics, analyze Shen Congwen's writing psychology and unique value judgement according to his experiences and thoroughly discuss the value of Shen Congwen's descriptions of folk customs.In the first part, the traditional folk customs filled with enthusiasm and beauty in western Hunan in Shen Congwen's works are reviewed. The excellent cultural traditions of the primitive western Hunan were vividly represented through Shen Congwen's poetic narration and a powerful and lively ethos was also highlighted. In the second part, the variation of the traditional folk customs in western Hunan and the emergence of new folk customs in multitude under the modernization wave are investigated. By combining the changes of folk customs with the characters and events with contemporary features closely and skillfully, Shen Congwen conveyed the information of ups and downs of life and of rise and decline of the era and showed the trend of the heteromorphic development of national psychology with the change of times. In the third part, the value of Shen Congwen's descriptions of folk customs is explored in depth and elucidated in four aspects, namely the psychology of recognizing folk morals, the narrative tactics of enchantment and disenchantment, the latent dialogue structure and the literary ideal of rural standard. In the conclusion of the present dissertation, the significance of the depiction of the folk customs in Shen Congwen's works is appraised and its enlightenment on our modern society is also pointed out.