A Study On Lmages Of China In Qiu Xiaolong's Works

Qiu Xiaolong is one of the most celebrated Chinese American detective novelists in the west in recent years.He put oriental stories into the western form of the novels,set in the context of contemporary China.The time span is from the 1950 s to the early 21 st century,presenting pictures and situations of modern China to western readers.Qiu Xiaolong's novels are enthusiastically pursued by the western world for many reasons.From the perspective of Image Studies in Comparative Literature,Qiu Xiaolong captures the psychology of western readers and shapes the images of China that conforms to their expectations,which is an important factor for the success of his works.The purpose of the study is to reveal the western cultural psychology and thinking mode through the interpretation of the types of China's images which presented and hidden in Qiu Xiaolong's works.This paper consists of five chapters.In the first chapter,it introduces the research significance of the topic,summarizes the research status of Qiu Xiaolong's works and the western images of China,and states the overall research methods as well as the basic structure of the thesis.In the second chapter,it is the generalization and analysis of several types of China's images presented in Qiu Xiaolong's works,from three dimensions which respectively are the political,the ethical,the poetic,to discuss their features and specific performances in the texts;In the third chapter,it focuses on the author's personal point of view,on the basis of the writer's status identity,explores the desire projection of Qiu Xiaolong,studies the motivation and intention of the production of China's images through revealing its hidden personal desires and culture;The fourth chapter is mainly from the perspective of western social collective imagination,deconstructs the images of China in the western literature,explores the relationship between the China's images in works of Qiu Xiaolong and social collective imagination,and illustrates the root of the collective production motivation to reveal the interaction between the text and the colonial mentality of western society.The final chapter is a conclusion about the common meaning of China's images as "the other" in the western world,which combined with the demand of western culture,demonstrates the possibility and necessity of the success of Qiu Xiaolong's works,and discusses the thinking mode,discourse system and power structure behind the phenomenon as well as the Utopian or ideological significance.Furthermore,it reflects andcriticizes the contemporary concepts of binary opposition between China and the west.Under the background of globalization,we discuss the images of China in the works of Qiu Xiaolong,not only from the analysis of the performances of typical types of China's images,but also focusing more on its historical roots,ideology and significance.As a starting point,this paper attempts to reveal the hidden colonial discourse power and colonial mentality in the text of Qiu Xiaolong,which is based on the theory of imagology of comparative literature,with the standpoint of western modernity,synthesizes various critical theories,including ethnic identity,Orientalism,power discourse,"mirror" theory and post-colonialism theory.