Writing Villages: Language, Objects, and Spirituality in the Discovery of Rural China, 1911-194

This dissertation examines the explosion of writings about rural life that emerged during the Republican period (1911-1949) in China, found in the essays, short stories, long-form novels, folklore journals, and ethnographic surveys that dotted the mediascape of the time period. Situating its arguments at the cross-section of Republican era village studies, intellectual history, and literary criticism, this dissertation argues that such writings did not merely reflect an already existing social reality beyond the text, but were themselves productive of the very concepts by which such a reality was to be imagined and acted upon. As such, they produced an imaginative binary that had not, hitherto, been dominant in Chinese cultural life: the urban vs. the rural. While such writings evidenced a persistent fascination with the languages, objects, and spiritual ideas that defined village cultures, they were not produced from within the geographic boundaries of village life. They were created by cosmopolitan intellectuals imbedded in translingual print networks of global reach. Such writings must thus be situated within the properly global context in which they were produced: a world roiled by the unevenness of capitalism in its imperialist form.;The world system produced by capitalism sought to fix peoples into monolingual national units arranged hierarchically across historical time. When seen from this developmental lens, the rural emerged in 20th century China as a site of "backwardness," in need of social and linguistic "reconstruction." I track how folklorists, writers, and language reformers responded to, but also complicated, this ethnographic drive to study, classify, and transform village life. Challenging a long standing axiom in the field of modern Chinese history that Republican era intellectuals "invented" the cultural figure of the peasant as a depressed allegory of the national condition, I argue that the songs, objects, and votive practices of village life remained key points of inquiry and negotiation for intellectuals throughout the era. As such, I tell a more nuanced story regarding the urban/rural binary, one that emphasizes that the incorporation of the village into the cultural life of the new republic was not an epistemologically enclosed process.