The Development of the Anti-Fable in Modern Chinese Literature: Grotesque Animal Imagery and the Quest for the Human

摘要

My dissertation examines how Lu Xun (1881-1936), Ba Jin (1904-2005), Lao She (1899-1966), Xiao Hong (1911-1942), and Zhou Libo (1908-1979) mobilized grotesque narrative techniques, blurred the lines between humanity and animals, and depicted a need for the coming of a truly human Chinese society in their use and development of the transnational genre of writing I call "anti-fable" during the 1910s through the 1940s. Whereas fables often contain animal characters that represent human society and attempt to teach some moral or ethical principle, in the anti-fable humans are depicted as grotesque beast-like creatures to critique existing power structures and practices. Chinese authors borrowed Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values" and critiqued traditional society and values for producing inhuman conditions. The anti-fable is a genre that engaged literary, historical, science fiction, horror, political, Confucian, Marxist, Buddhist, and Christian writings from Germany, Japan, the United States, Russia, and England, and flourished in China through Chinese authors' intervention and innovation. Although the Chinese literary field has long explored the development of individualism, humanism, and collectivism in modern Chinese literature, I argue that the question of animality, or rather animality as a problem to be overcome, was a central theme and driving force for literary inspiration at the advent of modern Chinese literature, and that the genre of the anti-fable was the primary literary vehicle through which the human-animal relationship was mediated and conveyed. The title of my dissertation is thus "The Development of the Anti-fable in Modern Chinese Literature: Grotesque Animal Imagery and the Quest for the Human".