Critiquing the city, envisioning the country: Shen Congwen’s urban fiction

Abstract

The essay studies Shen Congwen’s urban fictions in the literary contexts of his native-soil fiction and contemporary urban fiction by the Shanghai school in modern Chinese literature. It argues that Shen Congwen’s urban and rural writings demonstrate a profound irony: his perception of the disappearing rural idyllic and his panoramic representation are achieved through a modern sensibility as well as his disenchantment with the city, while his urban imagining/representation betrays an agrarianist distrust of the city, part of an age-old anti-urban Confucian thinking. His ambivalent attitude towards modernity also betrays a sense of loss in terms of his historical position regarding how to understand fundamental changes of his time as epitomized by the city. Nevertheless, Shen’s urban fiction has registered the initial efforts in modern Chinese literature in coming to grips of the modern city as it was emerging from its traditional form to become the locus of modernity and site of fundamental socioeconomic and cultural transformation.