The myth of the Chinese in the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

摘要

The dissertation investigates the Western idea of China in the selected novels or autobiographical writings of Pearl Buck, Emily Hahn, Agnes Smedley, Octave Mirbeau, Victor Segalen, and Andre Malraux, as well as the Chinese self-conception in novels and short stories by Lao She, Mao Dun, Ding Ling, Qian Zhongshu, and Nieh Hualing. Historically, the novels and autobiographical writings focus on the period between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, and articulate the transition of Western imperialism into modernity.; For the West, China as the main constituent of a reconceptualized past brings the nostalgic quest for "authentic" values and individual sovereignty face to face with its imperialist origins, thereby linking a repressive present (modernity) with an oppressive past (the history of imperialism).; For China, any act of nationalist self-formation has to address the Western idea of China as it is tied to an imperialist apparatus of control. However, although the Chinese works necessarily "respond" to the dominant Western discourse, they by no means repudiate it with a "definitive" or "unified" vision of China. As they re-negotiate a space for themselves between imperialism and modernization/Westernization, or nationalism and tradition, they run up against the same ambiguities implicit in the Western works, and also affirm their affiliation and collusion with an oppressive system they reject.; This "problematic" imperialism and nationalism is both my historical point of departure and the critical framework with which I approach Western and Chinese texts and attempt to effectuate a dialogue between them. Because new departures made by both Chinese and Western texts are embedded in the rejected history of oppression, they re-enact the latter's gesture even as they undermine its centrality. The counter-discourse is therefore always polarized within itself, situated between past and present, intention and method, affirmation and denial. It is in reading both Western and Chinese works with the aim of unmasking their ideological duplicity that I hope not only to re-construct the suppressed history of imperialism, but to suggest how each alternative version of history implies that other repressed versions remain to be uncovered.