The Study Of Shen Congwen’s Historical Consciousness

The present study on Shen Congwen, though fruitful, it has many gaps for further exploration. The Study of Shen Congwen’s historical consciousness is such a meaningful gap. As a master of literature, Shen Congwen had an excellent achievement and profound insight about the world. Compared to the study of his works, due attention should be given to the study on his thought. And only can we have a in-depth understanding of his painstaking writing after combing and explicating his complicated idea adequately.Meanwhile,it is authentically the right time for us to go into the subtle and aesthetic world of his works. With strong history feeling and rich historical thinking,his experience and introspection, along with his life history, is the important part of his thought, having an affect on many aspects of his creation than can’t be ignored. That is to say, the new road to Shen Congwen’s literary world is to find out the content and cause of formation of his historical consciousness. However, there is not much study on this aspect, leaving many fuzzy zone. So this text, has putting Shen Congwen’s historical consciousness as an independent proposition, in order to analyse the affect reflected from his works through combing his historical consciousness and summarizing its main features,making sure a deep and strong understanding to his historical consciousness in multi-perspective and all directions.Most importantly, it is my wish to complement the deficiency of the study on Shen Congwen’s thought.This text consists of four parts and three chapters. In the introduction part, first,is filled with simple definition of the concept of history and historical consciousness and affirms that the historical consciousness has exerted an important influence on writers in terms of the close contact of literature and history. After that, based on combing and summary of former research findings, I raise the inadequate and necessary study of Shen Congwen’s historical consciousness, establishing the research meaning of this text. Then in chapter one I summarize the connotation and characteristics of his historical consciousness in the following aspects——Shen Congwen’s historical overview and recognition of individuals and history, and emotional history, human nature and history. Additionally, I have a clear-cut understanding of the "history" definited by Shen Congwen, along with the connection and distinction between it and other concepts, showing Chen Congwen’s overall cognition and attitude to the history clearly. What’s more, the profound insight of Shen Congwen’s overview to the relationship between individuals and history is his negation heroic conception of history and his cognition which say the meaning of life beyond the historical significance. Shen Congwen accepted and valued the emotional tradition of the history, as well as cognised the relation between human nature and history thoroughly, which are also the outstanding and highly valuable part of his historical consciousness. Chapter two tells the generation process of Shen Congwen’s historical consciousness in different stages according to time linear trajectory, from the beginning to maturity and to in-depth stage. It is understanding the cause of Shen Congwen’s historical consciousness that can make me give prominence to the characteristics and changes during the process. In chapter three, from this text, I describe the influence of his historical consciousness during the creation at great length, analysing how does his historical consciousness effect the aesthetic tendency, selection of subject, background setting and structure arrangement of his novel, pointing out Shen Congwen’s unique insight of the history and even what makes his novels are full of following characteristics——historical consciousness of tragedy, avoiding the grand narrative consciously, weakening historical background and having spiral structure.