The Peasant intellectual Jia Pingwa: An historico-literary analysis of his life and early works (China)

The writer Jia Pingwa has gone through a metamorphosis, from writing simple stories along party lines to writing mature novels for the Chinese people and himself as an intellectual. For over thirty years Jia has written poetry, essays, short stories, travel notes, historical chronicles, novellas, novels as well as one non-fiction book on history. This dissertation examines his early works and places them within an historical perspective in order to understand this contemporary Chinese writer growing up under the political constraints within the People's Republic of China. Also, eleven early short stories by Jia Pingwa are translated, analyzed and critiqued in order to understand his personal reason for writing and to understand his literary contribution to the field of contemporary Chinese literature. Finally, his writings are examined from a national and international perspective in order to evaluate Jia's place in the field of world literature.