Toward a literature of the nation: China's new intellectual and literary discourses on the people from the 1890s through the 1920s.

摘要

This dissertation examines how the heightened interest in the concept of min (the people) re-fashioned the political imaginary and literary culture of China during the last few decades of the Qing and early Republic, a period of an unprecedented extent of national exigencies. The objective of this dissertation is two-fold: First, to demonstrate how the question of the people can form a vantage point for our critical understanding of the processes and impact of the epistemological changes that China experienced at that time. Second, to explicate the ways in which the changing concept of the people gave rise to a question of distance, a distance of the awakened intellectual self from the yet-to-be-awakened others. It is my contestation that this new intellectual consciousness about the question of distance informed the particular formation and development of literary culture in modern China.;This research draws on intellectual and literary essays, as well as fictional works, by late Qing reformers and fiction critics, May Fourth advocates of new literature, and Republican "popular" fiction writers. The underlying concerns of this project include the inter-relations between intellectual and literary discourses, the impact of the new understanding of the conceptual relationship between the people and the state, the question of language and medium, and the new intellectual question of distance. This was a time of drastic socio-cultural change that entailed a massive influx of foreign knowledge, which empowered the intellectuals to envisage an alternative political imaginary in the absence of a powerful state. The collapse of the existing intellectual paradigm, however, meant a loss of the dependable basis to write for and represent the popular others, which caused many new difficulties. Through tracing the unfolding of the new concept of the people both in intellectual and literary discussions, I hope to bring to light the new interpretive perspective to enrich the existing narrative of the advent and development of literary modernity and national consciousness in China.