The Narrative Of Conquered Nations In Late Qing Novels(1900-1911)

In the middle of the 19 th century, with the influx of western new knowledge, the overseas national ruin message enters into people’s field of vision. The active expansion of imperialist countries around the world and the rise of social Darwinism implied the intellectuals in late Qing the hint about China’s fate within the massage. As a respond, huge amounts of history books and political essays about overseas national ruin were written and published before and after 1900 in China, and it’s natural to be followed by the New Novel. In the process, the historical narrative were assimilated and challenged by all sorts of stylistic feature, narrative procedure and types of subject matter in traditional Chinese novels. In the most extreme case, the novel narrative almost got rid of the shackles of historical meta-narration and rooted in local narrative form and imaginary space. Although Kang Youwei’s historical biography has showed this kind of personal skill, it’s hard for the political meanings to remain stable in the popularity of late Qing novels, and it’s the ordinary readers’ understanding and interests that finally present in the narrative space. So we can understand the Asia image in the novels of late Qing have the obvious tendency of instrumentalization and otherization. Especially when China and those weak countries in Asia unite under the banner of the yellow race, we can both see the use of colonial discourse power and the desire to revert to the center of Old World. Although the various discourse resources do not necessarily produce any real effect on the historical tend, but the influence on popular discourse may still exist at present. It not only shows the mixed popular discourse space, but also provides guidance on our understanding of strong political discourse spreading in the space.