| This study has two purposes: how the family is portrayed in the family saga novels published in Mainland China during the twentieth century and whether literary texts can be taken as an indispensible information source to fill up the gaps left by the "code-like sequence" (Hart 104) or numerical data in sociology.;The samples are grouped into three chapters: the family saga novels in the Republican period, in Mao's era and in the 1980s-1990s - for analytical purposes and based on the hypothesis that correspondence exists between aesthetic conventions inscribed in the literary text and the legislating and hegemonic forces in that society, and that the literary text should be first of all read "as constituted within historically specific literary institutions" (Makaryk 126). Each chapter begins with a brief introduction of the historical background of the novels under discussion and proceeds to the analysis of each sample novel. Discussions are made in light of statistics, documents and other sociological data with the intention to find whether the information provided by the saga novels on the behavior of families and society generally corresponds to the statistical data circulating in the field of sociology. The conclusion is that the Chinese family saga novel, as a literary genre, has thematically and stylistically changed during the twentieth century, in tune with the changes in social forms and literary aesthetics; the intention to take the Chinese family saga novels as an indispensible information source for sociology turns out to be questionable, due to the observation that many acute social problems, concerning the family and its interaction with society, including interpersonal relationships, are not mentioned in many novels published in the 1980s-1990s, when the authors purposefully avoid sensitive topics or choose to play literary games in an age filled with conflicting and plural ideologies and paradigms. In the same way, social statistics might be misleading in that they are subject to available techniques or purposeful falsifications. Therefore, literature and sociology might be complementary to each other, but depending on when and how. Literature is only a reconstruction of certain moments but never a coherent totality. |
