Our world, the waste land: *American and Chinese modernist fiction in the early twentieth century

Mei Zhu, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study of Chinese and American fiction through the figure of the waste land. Anglo-America academia has sketched out a "waste land tradition" by looking at the fictional work under the influence of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a whole. This "waste land tradition" is crucial to modernist canons since the waste land has become a controlling metaphor for a post-war world of spiritual disillusionment, moral bankruptcy, and physical ruins. The formalistic innovations of the poem itself and the "waste land" fiction have also been considered as representative of modernism. Informed by western scholarship, this study attempts an expansion of this tradition to areas outside the Anglo-America scope. It sees that the social-historical turmoil and modernization China experienced rendered this country a literal waste land, and it followed that for Chinese writers of the 1920s to the 1950s, the metaphor of the waste land was all too real. The alienating conditions all over China produced oddly parallel literary manifestations of social critique through the same figure that American writers used. Thus, a figure for despair that followed WWI in the West and for the invasion and social disruptions that gripped China in the 1930s and the 1950s, the "waste land" tradition is one that goes beyond the boundaries of nation and time. The introduction chapter of this project defines "the waste land" aesthetics and touches upon its significance in both America and Chinese contexts. It provides the social, cultural, and historical background of China in the first half of the twentieth century. It also sketches a background on Chinese modernization, introducing the various schools of Chinese modernism, and summarizes how Chinese modernism parallel with and different from modernization in the West. The subsequent chapters are close-readings and analysis of the individual American and Chinese authors in pairs. The chapters progress in a linear way. That is, the sense of disillusionment and desolation deepens with the decades past. The first chapter is on the city modernists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mu Shiying. The second chapter is on Ernest Hemingway and Zhang Ailing who particularly responded to the horror of mass war and revolutions. The third chapter is on Djuna Barnes and Xiao Hong who express modern women's distress. What holds these figures together, besides thematic connections, was their commitment to formal invention. Formalistic innovations dedicated to representing new sense of alienation and the literary roots of each representation are equally important.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Literature|Asian literature|American literature

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