Pearl Buck As A Forerunner Of Postcolonial Writing: A Study Of Pearl Buck And Her Works From The Postcolonial Perspective

Pearl Buck, born in America and grew up in China, was a well-known American woman writer who was famous for writing about China, the Chinese peasants in particular. She won the Nobel Prize in 1938 mainly for her masterpiece The Good Earth, which remained on the "best-seller" list for a long time, earned hor several awards and was regarded as "the epic of Chinese peasant life". Pearl Buck's work was the subject of controversy from the beginning of her writing career.Postcolonial theory has been a hot commodity since the 80s of last century. It has turned out to be a powerful weapon for a large group of intellectuals to reflect and criticize the Western cultural hegemony and European Centralism. The representatives of this school are Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha. This paper intends to use postcolonial theory to study Pearl Buck and her works so as to appropriate her from a new angel.From the time Pearl Buck was brought to China as a little baby till the time she finally left China, China was in a changing period of warlords fighting each other and foreign powers invading one after another. Pearl Buck witnessed the Chinese sufferings caused by the colonists and the Chinese resistance to them. She was known throughout the world as an American writer who wrote about China, then a colonized country by multi-foreign powers. Her intention to write about China was essentially identical with and factually prior to postcolonial theory. Her writing was half a century earlier than those postcolonial writers, such as Tony Morrison. She was qualified as a forerunner of postcolonial writing.This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One expounds some important issues in postcolonial theory, including its definition, complexities, some problemswith the term "postcolonial literature", and finally singles out Homi Bhabha's hybridity as the core to generalize Pearl Buck's uniqueness in the following chapter.Chapter Two shows that Pearl Buck is a hybridity of East-West cultures by talking about Pearl Buck's biographical experience: her stay in China, her parents' influence on her and the impact of her extensive reading in both English and Chinese literature on her writing. Chapter Three focuses on Edward W. Said's Orientalism, defining the Orientalist and the Orientalism, the Orient and the Occident, the three forms of Orientalism and points out that Said's Orientalism has a strong impact on postcolonial studies, and then relates it with Pearl Buck's writing career in the context of semi-colonial and semi-feudal China. Chapter Four analyzes postcolonial features manifested in Pearl Buck's works, including the themes, characters of her masterpiece, The Good Earth, and the description of Chinese customs such as footbinding, concubinage, god-worship and so on. Based on the foregoing discussion and analyses, in the Conclusion I reexamine Pearl Buck and her works against postcolonial theory and Orientalism so as to argue that Pearl Buck is a forerunner of postcolonial theory, and further reason this point by comparison with Chinese writers and their works. Then I lay stress on her historical position in literary history, the progressive significance of her works of that period, and the realistic implications to peace and development in today's world.