ABSTRACT
The collective picture of the world that emerges from Republican literature, 1911-1949, often mirrors the power structure of the world and China’s position in it. Japan (dongyang) and Europe (xiyang) are prominent parts of this represented world, while Africa and Latin America are absent. Many Republican writers were educated or traveled extensively abroad; some of them were translators, and some were even bilingual writers. Their cosmopolitanism, however, was often involuntary. In their imagining of the world was a sense of anxiety stemming from the weak political position of China on the international stage. They often saw the world in terms of nation-states, some of which were examples for China to emulate, some not. In many works by male writers, world imagination was intertwined with sexual imagination. Japan occupied a special place, toward which writers were often ambivalent. Yu Dafu’s short stories portray a weak and sensitive young man with his defeats in sexual encounters in Japan, attributing those defeats to China’s weakness. If Yu Dafu’s story “Submerging” 沉沦 was the lowest point of Republican writers’ imagining of the world, the sense of national and personal frustration is more or less present in other writers too. However, Lao She’s novel Er Ma 二马, Guo Moruo’s poetry and prose, and Xu Zhimo’s poetry, with varying discursive strategies, mitigate such frustration. In Er Ma, Lao She domesticates London with his Beijing colloquial style and omnipresent and omniscient narrator. Guo Moruo, a poetic imagination that goes beyond nation-states, and the use of Whitmanesque cataloguing empower the poet to sing of mankind as a whole, erasing national boundaries. Xu Zhimo, representing the West and Japan by their natural landscape and women, gives the male writer a sense of control and appreciation. The chapter ends with Xu Dishan’s fiction about Southeast Asia in which national identities seem unimportant for the foreign or Chinese characters.
