Contradiction And Tension In Literary Of Mu Shiying

By the1930s Shanghai had become one of China’s main cultural and political centers, with a mix of exotic colonial foreign influences making the cultural scene in Shanghai anything but simple. This was especially the case among Leftist and Neosensualists writers such as Mu Shiying who were greatly influenced by such ideas and whose writings began to reflect the complexity of such prevailing ideologies. Taking this as a base, this dissertation shall attempt to explore how Mu Shiying, against such a diverse literary background, constructed his own literary form, while at the same time attempting to discover how Mu Shiying developed his own literary style of "contradiction" and "tension".In chapter one we talk about how leftist literature and Mu Shiying were directly related, given that Leftist literature was at the forefront of the1930s literary movement and that "Revolutionary Literature" and "Social-Realist Literature" became the literary mainstream. Living in1930s Shanghai, Mu Shiying was unable to avoid Leftist literary influences, yet for Mu, Leftist literature was at the same time attractive and unappealing. In addition, Mu Shiying’s own attitude towards literature and the special role played by Shanghai found him striving for new creative and artistic fronts, with Mu eventually opting to shift from Leftist to Neosensualist literature, thus forming the period of "polarization" in his literary opus.In chapter two I discuss how Mu Shiying’s work flourishes as a Neosensualist. Mu excelled at exploiting Neosensualism in order to describe life in a modern metropolis. For Mu, life in a metropolis was special and his attitude towards life and of those around him was full of "rebellion" and "criticism" as well as "obsession" and "pity". In terms of material and spiritual life Mu Shiying experienced a moral split, thus due to a writer’s "dual morality" Mu viewed the city in dual fashion. Mu’s "dual morality" created for him a "central space" from which to carve out a "persona and space" on the edge of the city.In chapter three I place Mu Shiying’s works within the context of Proletarian and Neosensualist literature, from which we learn that his main creative theme was that of the "Metropolis". Nevertheless, for a writer caught in the whirlpool of history, his works could not but reflect China’s contemporary social situation. This is especially the case for Shanghai as a wartime city during the1930s, much of the horrors of which appear in Mu’s works. From a reading of Mu Shiying’s writings on that period we can gain a greater understanding of Mu’s attitude towards war.