"Imagined Community" And Imagination Of "Community"

Nationalism,socialism and liberalism are the most three important ideological trends in the 20th century. However, due to its innate irrationalism, nationalism has been excluded from the orthodox research as a depreciated being. As an oriental stress response nationalism, Chinese nationalism grows with the development of modernity in the contemporary humiliating times. But when we abandon the first impression and make a new survey of the literature in the new era, we will find that nationalism has exerted tremendous influence on the writer's notion and technique as a latent social trend of thoughts.Up until now, there is little research on nationalism broad and home and even less on the influence of nationalism on literature. Contemporary British scholar Anderson defines nationalism as an imagined, limited,"community"with sovereignty.This thesis is an attempt at studying the relationship between nationalism and Chinese literature in new era under the influence of Anderson's theory, with extensive reading of nationalism theory and most representative works, in the means of category analysis and close reading. Chinese nationalism is mainly revealed through cultural nationalism and political nationalism. Their respective influence on literature will be analyzed in three parts.The first part: Introduction."Imagined Community"and Imagination of"Community"This part mainly gives a definition of nationalism with a comprehensive reference of research on nationalism, and classifies it into three models after analysis from broad and narrow aspects. The simple analysis of history of rise of the Chinese nationalism results in the conclusion that contemporary China endures the process from being a"world"to"country". The influence of nationalism on contemporary Chinese literature is also discussed briefly in this part.