A study of yingxi fiction in the early republican China = Min chu ying xi xiao shuo yan jiu

Abstract

The dissertation attempted to study Yingxi Fiction, a genre of fiction, which emerged and prevailed in Shanghai during the early two decades of the twentieth century. The majority of writers of Yingxi fiction at that time were literati of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School. After watching the imported silent movies, they recorded the contents and adapted them as fictional texts for the purpose of introducing the stories to those who could not afford to watch the films. This type of genre was named Yingxi fiction and had been welcomed by public readers at leisure. In fact Yingxi fiction had implied how traditional literati received and absorbed western cultural elements on their way to pursue Chinese modernity. This study would like to conduct a close examination of Yingxi fiction, which has been previously ignored, through in-depth analysis of the texts and investigation of its social as well as cultural significance.

This dissertation consisted of five chapters. Chapter One was an introduction of the popular fiction, movie and Yingxi fiction in Early Republican China. Previous studies on Yingxi fiction were briefly presented as well.

Chapter Two dealt with the emergence of Yingxi fiction. The prefaces and peer reviews of some works of this genre would be especially studied in order to explore the motivations of the writers and their approaches to compose the Yingxi fiction. Three Yingxi fiction writers, Zhou Shoujuan (1895-1968), Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973) and Lu Dan’an(1894-1980), were comprehensively illustrated as case studies.

Chapter Three focused on the application of “Paradigm” in textual analyses of Yingxi fiction. Serving as an unusual spectacle, paradigm provided a thorough understanding of the hybrid narrative style of the stories. By discussing the narrative pause, redundancy, story modes and language usage, the way in which the paradigm of Chinese fiction influenced by western literature would been exposed.

Chapter Four discussed the graph-text conversion in Yingxi fiction. It was suggested that writers’ failure in identifying the moral issues and female images in western movies could be explained and might be regarded as the writers’ skills of adaptation of the stories for the sake of Chinese representations.

Lastly, the conclusion chapter summed up the distinctive features of Yingxi fiction, the prominence of the genre and its significance in modern Chinese literature. Besides, the limitations and reasons of fading away of Yingxi fiction would also be expounded.