Saving the nation through culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China (1918--1949).

摘要

The Modern Chinese Folklore Movement in the first half of the twentieth century was a literary movement, but it was also profoundly political and social. Chinese intellectuals attempted to find a way to save the Chinese nation by rediscovering culture from traditions and enlightening the common people. However, the proponents of the Folklore Movement faced tremendous difficulties from the 1920s to 1940s due to the continuing political and social upheaval that accompanied the rise and fall of warlordism, the National Revolution, Japanese invasion, and full-blown civil war. During this relatively short period of time, the Folklore Movement went through a series of transitory phases. At first it supported a literary revolution with aspirations of saving the nation, shifted to establishing folklore as an academic enterprise, moved on to focusing on ethnological studies in the southwest region, and was finally replaced by the Communist New Literature and Art Movement.;Keywords: Folklore Movement, Folklore Studies, Chinese History, Republican China, Intellectuals, 20th Century, China, Nationalism;This study will comprehensively examine the evolution of the Chinese Folklore Movement in the Republican era by using a detailed historical approach based on piecing together its scattered remaining fragments. It follows the evolution of the movement and the transfer of its geographical focal point to various locales. This dissertation will present the Folklore Movement against the wider backdrop of Chinese society in a turbulent transitional phrase. This dissertation will address many key questions in order to represent the new intellectuals' efforts to save the nation, their struggles in difficult situations, and the influence of domestic political power on this nationalist intellectual movement. Specifically, it will probe why this movement rose to prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century, how folklore researchers advanced the movement, the reasons behind its relocation to different cities at different times, and how its development was interrupted and ultimately came to a close. This study will explore the unique features of this movement by focusing on the dilemma between modern academic construction and national salvation faced by its practitioners. It will also offer a broader conception of the Chinese Folklore Movement, along with detailed information on the important folklore organizations, publications, and folklore researchers.