The Modernistic Writing Aross Semicolonial Contexts

This dissertation studies the road of a modern writer Liu na'ou, who moved into Shanghai from Japan in 1926. The relationship between his writing of modernism and the semi-colonial Shanghai is the main focus of my dissertation.The study of Liu is equally barren in either China mainland or Taiwan for their respective historical reason, though Liu is the founder of the initial modernism in Chinese modern literature. By what I call barren is not only refer to the quantity of studies, but the quality of them. It was not only reflected in the narrow literature critiques by using the method of ideology, but also had its trait in the hot trend of cosmopolitan studies in the context of pursuing the modernity in 1990's. Of course the initial'non-China'move in Taiwan also contribute a lot to the barren state of studies.The colonizer and colonized, the modernism of Liu and the empire had the same history in semi-colonial Shanghai. We can found different images of Shanghai which were written with different experience in Liu's modernism in telling the story of Shanghai, also, we can reflect how did the modernism grow inherently inside the relationship of capitalization and was structured eventually by studying them. The complicated culture factors behind Liu made him perfect model in studying the history of literature in 1930's Shanghai. We can see the hardness the initial modernism which transcend the boundary of nations and cultures in merging into China. We can have a knowledge of the intrinsic relation between modernism and semi-colonialism with the understanding of the background of Liu.It is not accidental that Liu choose Shanghai for his birth of modernism which is on one hand need to accomplish modernization both in content and style so that can get its stand foot by the blessedness acquired by accomplice with empirenism, on the other hand, it explored the ugliness of ethnic affairs, sex, social class and gave evidence for the accuse of colonialism by exaggeratedly describing the semi-colonial cosmopolitanThe reason that the writing of Liu was contended by different historical narrative is for his own multi-choice culture factors. There was no cutting edge of modernism and it has an ambiguous relationship with the vivid and vigorous Shanghai in 1930's.