Monumental fictions: Geopoetics, Li Jieren, and historical imagination in twentieth-century China

The aim of this thesis is to locate the formation of geopoetics, locality, historical imagination, and the novel as they are intertwined in the project of literary modernity and nation building in twentieth-century China. My analysis is organized around such major questions as: How well are the notions of spatiality, geographical specificity, and everydayness conceived in the Chinese construction of the "modern epic"? To what extent can the novel accommodate the local and the national, the quotidian and the monumental, the part and the whole? This study navigates an alternative path through examining the "great river novels" (roman-fleuve) of Li Jieren (189--1962), whose massive series of novels on the Republican Revolution (1911) in Sichuan traversed the most volatile moments and ideological terrains in modern Chinese cultural history.; In Chapter One I present the context of literary production in which the May Fourth intelligentsia sought to establish new fictional genres and call into being a new Chinese nation through translating foreign fiction theories. How well can the intellectual rhetoric of literary modernity resolve the formal question of the modern novel in its representation of nationhood? Chapter Two continues to explore this question by focusing on Mao Dun's writing of Ziye (Midnight, 1933). Where Mao Dun failed to depict the rural domain as lived reality and everydayness, Li Jieren succeeded in integrating quotidian rural existence by adapting the roman-fleuve to the Chinese circumstances. Chapters Three and Four look into Li's panoramic scheme and particularly into his fiction, Sishui weilan (Ripples on dead water, 1936), and explore the author's strategy to problematize a teleological historical narrative by means of his topographical representation of the "hometown." The last chapter investigates the tensions between the national and the local, the present and the teleological as they are dramatically brought up in the polyphonic trilogy of Da bo (The great wave, 1937).; I conclude by arguing that Li's monumental fiction and geopoetics will open up some alternative "theoretical space" for us to ponder the questions of spatiality and fictional form, everydayness and modernity, locality and marginality in historical writing and literary historiography.