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Nostalgia for the Old Versus Wonder at the New: Cultural disenchantment and the temptation of modernity in Nie Hai Hua

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2013

GUO-OU ZHUANG
GUO-OU ZHUANG*
Affiliation:
Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Central Arkansas, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper attempts to revise aspects of the existing interpretations of Nie Hai Hua (A Flower in a Sinful Sea) by applying perspectives from post-colonial studies to the study of this late Qing Chinese novel. Here the novel is read as a national narrative that portrays the emergence of China as a modern nation state from a decaying empire, with its intelligentsia caught between their desire to embrace modernity and nostalgia for cultural traditions. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, traditional Chinese scholars were faced with a predicament: they were lured by the modernity represented by Western learning, on the one hand, but were tied by an emotional link to Chinese tradition, on the other. In a disintegrating society, they struggled both to preserve their own cultural identity and construct a new identity. The opposing groups of Chinese literati portrayed in the novel in fact reflect the schizophrenic state of the Chinese consciousness on the threshold of modernity.

To write the story of the nation demands that we articulate that archaic ambivalence that informs modernity.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 550 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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