| Mao Dun is a famous writer, literary critic, cultural activist and social activist in the history of modern Chinese literature as well as one of the founders of Chinese revolutionary literature and art. He is the master of modern Chinese literature with remarkable achievements in literary creation. As one of the leading figures in the "May Fourth" New Literature Movement, Mao Dun not only made outstanding contributions to the development of literary theory and literary criticism, but also expressed his unique understanding of literary creation through his literary criticism, revealing a continuous progress of his attitudes towards literary creation. Meanwhile, as the representative of the "1930s Literature", in the era of exchange and collision between Chinese and Western literary currents, Mao Dun successfully enriched his realism literature theory through a large amount of novel writing practice and finally created the so-called “Mao Dun Novel Writing Paradigm”.Mao Dun's literary value is not only represented in his literary criticism and creation achievements, but is also deeply reflected in the fact that he is entitled to represent a tradition of Chinese New Literature, which has been inherited and developed by later generations as a classic paradigm. This paradigm is most fully displayed in his representative and influential novels created by integrating Chinese and Western narrative traditions.A large number of studies have been done on Mao Dun's novels in the past decades. However, most researches have focused on the characterization in his novels and the ideological significance of his works, and much discussion has been made on the social function of Mao Dun's novels and the relationship between them and the western novels. Presently, it is widely agreed that Mao Dun's works is a mirror of the social reality of that time, and Mao Dun's literary value mainly lies in the close correspondence between the literary images and the realities.Yet, the present study proposes that the “Mao Dun Tradition” Paradigm, established under that special historical background through selection, integration and innovation at the intersection of Chinese and western literary tradition, is supposed to be able to open up a new research perspective for a thorough understanding of the aesthetics in Mao Dun's novels and the significance of it as a call for contemporary literature to make a spiritual return to the classic paradigm.The present study is a narrative analysis of Mao Dun's novels with a focus on the narrative modes in view of the intersection of western and Chinese narrative traditions, aiming at a clarification of the “Mao Dun Tradition” Paradigm in his literary works and revealing his unique values in Chinese literary history under the background of the development and evolution of Chinese modern literary trends.The dissertation consists of five parts. Based on a respective examination of the relationship between Mao Dun's ideas and Chinese as well as Western narrative tradiitons, Part One explores Mao Dun's acceptance of the two narrative traditions by analyzing how his realistic literary theories summarized and integrated the two traditions. From Part Two to Part Four, a detailed study of the influences from Chinese and Western narrative traditions on Mao Dun's novels is made in terms of narrative contents, narrative perspectives and narrative time respectively with specific texts for illustrations. The fifth part is devoted to a case study of Mao Dun's masterpiece Midnight. The confrontation and integration of two different traditions in Midnight is elaborated through a comparative analysis of the influences from Chinese traditional narrative mode and Russian critical realistic narrative mode.To sum up, the present study has found that Mao Dun, as a leading figure of Chinese New Literature, did make everlasting contribution to the development of Chinese modern literature and unique historical and realistic values are still rich in his novels. |
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