The present study serves to explore the relationships between cities and literature by addressing the issues of space, time, and modernity in four works of fiction, Lao She’s Luotuo xiangzi (Camel Xiangzi, aka Rickshaw Boy), Mao Dun’s Ziye (Midnight), Ba Jin’s Han ye (Cold nights), and Zhang Ailing’s Qingcheng zhi lian (Love in a fallen city), and the four cities they depict, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, respectively.
In this thesis I analyze the depictions of the cities in the four works, and situate them in their historical and geographical contexts to examine the characteristics of each city as represented in the novels. In studying urban space in the literary texts, I try to address issues of the “imaginablity” of cities to question how physical urban space intertwines with the characters’ perception and imagination about the cities and their own psychological activities.
These works are about the characters, the plots, or war in the first half of the twentieth century; they are also about cities, the human experience in urban space, and their understanding or reaction about the urban space. The experience of cities in Republican era fiction is a novel one, one associated with a new modern historical consciousness. The human experience of cities is one that intertwines with the historical moment of China changing its role from empire to republic. The emergence of the city and of the literature about the city is also part of the historical change that ensued from the revolution to overthrow the empire and to establish the republic.
The representations of cities in Republican-era Chinese literature suggest the emergence of the importance of the city in China’s modernization process. The city was the locus of modernity and social transformation and city life became desirable. The emerging city and its changing social and cultural position thus required representational legitimacy through description and narration. As I have shown in this thesis, literature was an important vehicle for this shaping of this public urban imagination. The representations of cities in literary works developed side-by-side with the urbanization progress, and participated in this progress by shaping the public consensus about how the city should evolve and what kind of city life people should live. These four works imagine four cities and how its residents interact and come to identify with their cities in times of rapid modernization and traumatic warfare.