Regional or Nativist Literature

1
Regional or Nativist Literature

• local / Imperial tension regional cultures
  versus universal culture of the classics
• dialects and local cultures
• written language and national unity

2
Regional Literature Defined

• writing that consciously draws from a particular
  identifiable region and informs most of a
  writers fictional works
• the writer identifies himself with the region,
  defines self primarily in terms of the region
• conscious portrayal of regional customs, habits,
  and dialectic, etc.
• Western examples William Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha
  cycle), Twain, Quebec writers, etc
• Chinese regionalism never supercedes national
  identity.

William Faulkner
3
May Fourth National vs. Regionalism

• generally, the May Fourth generation was
  nationalist in their orientation
• alienated from their rural homes and attracted to
  the metropolis and the new universal culture
  of the West
• tendency to allegorize the particular in national
  terms
• yet, stories such as Lu Xuns My Old Hometown
  suggest a more complex relationship with home and
  native place

Entrance to a Lu Xun museum in his hometown of
Shaoxing
4
Origins of modern regional consciousness
Top Gu Jiegang ??? bottom Liu Bannong ???

• some May Fourth intellectuals (e.g. Hu Shi) were
  interested in traditional folk culture as a
  counter-tradition
• Folk Movement Gu Jiegang, Folksong Weekly and
  Folklore Weekly Going to People (????)
  cultural preservation in service of cultural
  nationalism
• reaction to modernization and nostalgia for a
  lost past
• reaction to growing centralization (political and
  ideological)
• disenchantment with Western literary models
• promotion of popular literature, peasant themes,
  and national forms
• Local vs. national identity conservative vs.
  subversive ideological message

5
Development of regional (nativist) writing

• Nativist literature (????) early efforts in
  rural themes and regional writing among the May
  Fourth generation
• Lu Xun is generally called the first of these
  nativist writers
• Nativism strengthened in the 1930s and 40s Shen
  Congwen ??? (Hunan) Ai Wu ?? (Sichuan) Xiao
  Hong ??, Xiao Jun ?? and Duanmu Hongliang ????
  (Northeast) Lao She ?? (Peking) Zhao Shuli ???
  (Shanxi), etc.
• Nativist movement in Taiwan in the 1960s and 70s
  connected with Taiwan independence movement
• Similar movement in the 1980s in PRC reaction to
  the centralization of ideology and political
  vision of the Mao era

6
Shen Congwen ??? (1902-88)

• Born in Fenghuang County, Western Hunan,
  bordering on Guizhou
• Grandma was a Miao ethnic minority, mother was of
  Tujia
• Little formal education joined a local militia
  in 1918
• Went to Peking in 1923 audited at Peking Univ.
  and studied on his own began actively writing in
  1924 later taught at various universities
• Very prolific before 1949 most famous work is
  the novella Border Town (1934)
• Stopped writing fiction after 1949 attacked by
  party intellectuals like Guo Moruo and Xia Yan
  labelled as peach-pink writer attempted
  suicide worked as a researcher at the Chinese
  Museum of History

7
Western Hunan (Xiangxi ??)
Right A Miao girl trying on her wedding dress
above ? people in celebration
Fenghuang County ???
8
Xiaoxiao
Above what a coed might look like Right
poster for the 1986 film adaptation of Shen
Congwens story