Indigenization of the western detective fiction (1896-1949) : a new perspective on modernity and the making of a literature = 西方偵探小說中國化研究 (1896-1949) : 一個如何現代怎樣文學問題

Abstract

Before the Western literary genre of detective fiction was introduced to China through the translations at the end of the 19th century, about crimes and how to solve a crime, pre-modern Chinese literature only had gong’an (legal case) fiction, a genre which focuses on criminal court cases. In 1896, Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories appeared in Chinese, and by the early twentieth century writers had begun publishing a new kind of detective fiction in Chinese, drawing on both the new models from English as well as earlier Chinese styles. Detective fiction is part of the spread of Western studies into China in modern times and a product of cultural and ideological conflict and integration between China and the West. As such, it not only reflects a literary situation, but can also be studied against a broad social and historical backdrop. The dissertation proposed herein will focus first on the differences between Western detective fiction and Chinese gong’an fiction, then, analyzing what happened to the Western import of detective fiction in modern china and how was it explained, transformed and localized during that time. Most of the previous researches concentrate on representative samples of the most prominent works of Chinese detective fiction, such as Cheng Xiaoqing (1893-1976) and Sun Liaohong’s (?-1958) detective stories. My dissertation, in contrast, will try to build an overall framework of Chinese detective fiction history through lesser known novelists such as He Puzhai(1887-?) and Zeng Xiaoxian( dates unknown). More importantly, it studies the interaction between Chinese detective fiction and traditional Chinese gong’an fiction. The genre of Chinese detective fiction would not have been born if Western detective fiction had not been translated. While Western detective fiction relies on concepts of individual rights and rule of law, even as Chinese detective fiction adopted and adapted Western narrative techniques, they did not get rid of Chinese gong’an fiction’s core values such as morality, clan ethics, karma, and so on. So the dissertation seeks to point out the “indigenous” features of the Chinese detective fiction during the late Qing and early republic periods and examine why those Chinese writers chose to reshape detective fiction -an imported literary genre - with these indigenous features. Earlier studies often argue that the “old littérateurs” in modern China, like the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School refused to face up to the Western challenge. Analyzing the existing documents and the personal memoirs of Chinese detective novelists, I conclude that most of these writers were in fact well aware of the impact of Western ideologies and intellectual trends on Chinese society. Their preference for the indigenous, therefore, was not a blind choice but a conscious act. In the context of modern China, unlike the “new literature” authors’ (as led by Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu) positive responses to Western ideas, a number of the Chinese detective novelists saw both the advantage and the threat of certain kinds of Westernization, but still acted as loyal inheritors of Chinese cultural tradition. For example, their detective stories usually end with a set of traditional moral principles that warn against the invasion by Western values, and that support Confucian thoughts. This group of writers treated Western ideas not really as the way to save the nation. Rather, they viewed the “westernization” of the empires with alarm, and resorted to a set of traditional Chinese cultural values for ways of precluding such hegemony. Their efforts of reshaping detective fiction by this means, I argue, shed a new light on Chinese modernity and literary transformation during that time. That is, Chinese detective fiction in transition from 1896 to 1949 served as an alternative response to modernity from that offered by the now lionized “New Culture Movement”, figured not simply as the great triumph of the West over the Chinese society, but rather suggested a dynamic process of cultural collisions and re-creation, and even provided another perspective on the process of modernity that China underwent from the 19th century onwards.