My dissertation examines three notions of representation emerging along a historical process in which Chinese writers continued to create social imaginaries about the nation, the masses and the people in the early twentieth century. I explore the increasing criticisms of the western idea of the novel since the mid-1920s and the rise of a new overwhelming literary genre: a revolutionary storytelling in the 1940s. I particularly study a unique politics of aesthetics of this rural storytelling developed by a communist writer Zhao Shuli.The first chapter examines the relationship between nation and narration in the May Fourth era. In a form of dialogue with Benedict Anderson's theory of the novel, I read out an Andersonian trend in Hu Shi's theory of the short story which takes the novel as essentially a form of the nation's homogenous empty time. Meanwhile I also study a different idea of representation embodied in Lu Xun's fiction.Chapter Two surveys an alternative understanding of the novel starting with the decline of the enlightenment movement after 1928. I attribute the success of the epistemological turn largely to the critics' invention of a critical term---gushi (story)---which brought the May Fourth notion of the novel to a new hermeneutic horizon.Chapter Three surveys and critiques the concept of the people's literature in Mao's revolutionary discourse. In the light of Nietzsche's nihilism and Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, I develop the idea that Mao's political idea of the people is characterized by a sense of nihilism, that is, ontological---without ontology---deconstruction as the necessary process of creation.Chapter Four interprets the politics of aesthetics of Zhao Shuli in the light of Benjamin's theory of flaneur.Chapter Five explores the aesthetic configuration of "dialogic being" in Zhao's depiction of peasant figures. I argue for its internal response to Mao's political idea of New Democracy.
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