A Brief Comment On "Novels Focused On Future"of Late Qing Dynasty

"Novels Focused on Future" is a great deal of novels written in Late Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, which hasn’t been sufficiently researched before. In these novels, writers plotted their stories in kinds of quirky space and time according to their bold imagination, by which they expressed their expectation for our nation and the whole country in an informal way. Unlike those Rebuking Novels which criticized the darkness and corruption of the society, and hence were famous own to Lu Xun and A Ying’s research in the past years; these novels recorded the optimistic expectations of people who lived in that great transformation time. In chapter one, we clarified the conception of "Novels Focused on Future", and analyzed its development course and historical backgrounds. In chapter two, we assorted these novels briefly according to the difference of the time and space in which the future were set in these novels. In chapter three, we analyzed imaginations concerning the whole country and different districts, combining with novels that we can see from existing texts. In imaginations about the future of the whole country, we found that most of these writers believed that China will become one of the strongest countries in the world. In imaginations about the future of different districts, we found that own to its earliest contact with the western, writers from Shang Hai tend to imagine more modern things in their novels, while writers from other places thought more about how to get rid of the destiny of been colonized. In chapter four, we enumerated writers’imagination about all aspects of life in the future from clothing, eating, housing, and transportations. After analyzing these imaginations concerning details, we inferred that writers in Late Qing dynasty did not accept the western civilization totally and uncritically, and they also did not deny the traditional Chinese civilization in the same way. They believe firmly that it is the traditional Chinese civilization which has been improved in the progress of modernization that will prosperous in the future."Novels Focused on Future" is the pioneer collective imagination about the traditional society of Chinese intellectual from all sectors or groups. Despite those differences in details due to the variance in time, the consistency in the theme of these novels depicted the real expectation of reviving Chinese nation and taking part into the international affairs peacefully of Chinese intellectual lived in the beginning of the20century.