A Chinese romantic's journey through time and space: Cosmopolitanism, nationalism and nostalgia in the work of Xu Xu (1908--1980).

摘要

In my dissertation, I explore the work of one of China's most popular modern authors in order to demonstrate how our understanding of certain aspects central to Chinese modernity is greatly expanded if read within the conceptual framework of literary Romanticism. My dissertation consists of four topical chapters that place Xu Xu's understudied oeuvre into the context of Republican-period (1912--1949) travel writing, urban modernism, wartime popular literature and drama, and Hong Kong postwar literature. By recontextualizing Xu's work, I challenge conventional notions about the nation, the self, the popular, and emigre identity as proposed by most studies of the period. I argue that Xu simultaneously espoused cosmopolitanism and an affirmative nationalism, revived traditional narratives of the strange (zhiguai ) to appropriate modernist European literary techniques and aesthetics, embraced a quasi-existentialist view of the self, and shared a nostalgia for a metaphysical home that lies at the center of a Romantic world view. Xu's oeuvre thus constitutes a highly original response to modernity that not only places Chinese modernism into a global framework of literary Romanticism, but also influenced the development of a modern Chinese literature in post-war Hong Kong, Taiwan and Sinophone communities around the world where topics like Chinese identity, displacement and nostalgia, and the role of the self in society continue to be central in contemporary culture.