Western Ideal Picture Of Construction And Shanghai Experience

Shen Congwen,who called himself "a country man", was born and raised in Xiangxi. With the inconvenient transportation, foreign culture was difficult to enter into this area, so that original lifestyle or moral concept was preserved. Beijing was an important culture center where Chinese traditional literature perserved well, but in Shen Congwen’s eyes, it was just larger than Xiangxi. When Shen Congwen lived in Beijing, he wrote a lot of works. Although these works were wrote on the background of Xiangxi’s world, he just Introduced a Xiangxi world. These works were simple in content and without high artistic value.During1920s-1930s, the colonizing modern Shanghai city made Shen Congwen feel unaccustomed and amaze at what he had seen there. The "urban civilization" brough by colonist and "the world of Xiangxi"in Shen Congwen’s eyes formed a sharp contrast and consistently collided with each other in Shen Congwen’s mind. In the end, all these brought him enormous creativity and constantinspiration.In Shanghai, the"country man" Shen Congwen had become an educated modern " urban people". But he still created the urban world and xiangxi word in the eyes of a country man. With the transformation of identity, the sight in Shen Congwen’s novels had interchanged consistently between a country man and a urban man. And his literal creation theme had changed too. He was acutely aware that the Xiangxi world, which he felt deeply proud, was the same as the urban world, the bad behaviors of urban people were also emerged in Xiangxi people, and the good customs was phasing out. Obsessed by these changes, he struggled in a dilemma between the two choices. Finally, Shen Congwen set his mind on "Xiangxi world". He attempted to save the gradually degraded nation through constructing a wonderful Xiangxi world.