Cross-cultural Narrative About China

The American writer Pearl S. Buck, the modern Chinese writer Lin Yutang and the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston wrote full-length narrative works about China in English and were all engaged in literary work in a certain cross-cultural context. This thesis chose these works as a basis of the literary textual analysis, studied the relationship between "cross-culture" and "narrative" in these works from various levels and explored the problem how the literary creation realized the meanings of culture in a heterogeneous cultural context. In the course of specific demonstration, the thesis interpreted these narrative works about China with the senses of "culture" at various levels, discussed the different features of the Chinese images created by these texts from the perspective of imagologie, and meanwhile probed into the problems of cultural identity, narrative policy and cultural utilization through the perspectives of cultural anthropology and post-colonialist criticism. Hence, the subject of this thesis is to study a group of cross-cultural narrative works about China by Pearl S. Buck, Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston, and to discover and explore the interplay of images, culture identity and narrative policy in literary writing through the narrations having the same subject about "China", thereby to recognize the various possible forms and patterns of the literature's cultural transmission in cross-cultural narration and to examine the problems of "reality and imagination" and "history and fiction" in the cross-cultural context and the "bi-directional or unidirectional channel" in the communication between the Chinese and Western culture through the dissimilarity among the heterogeneous images. Accordingly, we can understand our own culture better in the cross-cultural literary texts.