Study On Foreigner Images In China In On A Chinese Screen

William Somerset Maugham(1874-1965)is a famous British novelist,playwright and essayist,whose works are characterized by strong exoticism.On a Chinese Screen is the product of Maugham’s visit to China.The work consists of 58 articles,with concise style and vivid depiction of figures.It was regarded as "Maugham’s first-rate" by The Times Literary Supplement.Compared with his novels and dramas,On a Chinese Screen,the travel note,with a typical epitome of western colonial rule in China in the early 20th century,objectively reflects his emotional attitude towards oriental countries and the cognition of his own nationality.The foreigner images in China provide a good starting point for studying Maugham’s view of human nature and culture outlook.The existing studies of Maugham at home and abroad mainly focus on his representative novels and short stories,and pay less attention to his travels.Researches on On a Chinese Screen are centered on the image of China and discussions of the group foreigner images in China don’t go deep enough.This thesis intends to interpret the foreigner images in China in On a Chinese Screen with multiple literary approaches,such as narratology,psychological analysis,social history criticism.This thesis first analyzes the foreigner images in China as the subject,summarizes the professional characteristics and explores the cultural psychological dilemma of foreigners in China under the cross-cultural background.Finally,it discusses the formation causes of the foreigner images in China and reveals their complex social and cultural psychology.The thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter one introduces the image of foreigners in China from the view of subject with the method of narratology.The implied image "you" who starts the book is the ideal reader image conceived by the author to refer to the British men,and reveal the directivity of the book.The narrator "I" runs through the whole text and stands for both the character in the story and the narrator out of the story,which maintains the aesthetic balance among the author,the readers,the narrator and the characters.At the same time,it conveys to the reader some value judgments."He",the image of foreigners being observed in the book,refers to both the British and other foreigners in China.The exploration and the construction of characteristics of British people in China is enhanced by comparing them with other foreigners in China,which lays the foundation for the specific image discussion in the following chapters.Chapter two describes the professional foreigner images in China.According to foreigners’ professional status and purposes to come to China,it can be divided into three categories:the nugget,the redeemer,and the official.Based on the facts and statistics of Westerners in China at the beginning of the 20th century,this chapter analyzes the characteristics of foreigners in China,to restore a relatively practical situation of foreigners in China.Chapter three continues to reveal the cultural psychological dilemma of foreigners in China with the method of cultural psychological criticism in three aspects,according to their different attitudes towards China.The first kind of dilemma is escape,mainly represented by the cultural disregard with a blind eye to the conflicts between Chinese and Western cultures,and the autistic thinking resulted from a stubborn conservation.The culture shocks and conflicts make this group of foreigners fall into a rigid fantasy of cultural identity.The second dilemma is hostility,which manifests as cultural replacement and rebellion.The third is ambivalence,proved by the blind optimism about cultural exchanges and bidirectional alienation between China and the West.Chapter four analyzes the formation causes of the foreigner images in China from the historical background,the national personality traits of the British and Maugham’s personal experiences.The external factor resulting in the confusion and exhaustion of the foreigner lies in the difficulty to integrate into the Chinese society in the early 20th century,a changeable age,the decline of British imperialist hegemony and the general influence by the mental crisis after the World War I;While the internal factor comes from the the British national character by an exotic environment between the gentleman spirit and optimism,indifference and arrogance.Moreover,the bumpy rides in Maugham’s life enables him to write the book in a humanitarian way,but his depiction of China with forceful purposes exposes his colonialism nature in the entanglements between tradition and reality,which,as the author’s emotional factors,also helps to bring about the foreigner images in the book.In the conclusion of this thesis,the author points out the research value of the travel notes of Maugham.The study of the foreigner images in China highlights Maugham’s criticism of human nature and his colonial awareness.The conclusion also makes a comparison between the foreigner images in China shaped by Maugham and the images of colonists shaped by other contemporary western writers to make a new judgment on the image of foreigners in China by Maugham,and reverse the tendency of placing too much emphasis on the image of China and make some reflections on the cross-cultural communication between China and the West.