Heroes without a battlefield: Nationalism, identity, and the aesthetics of dissolution in Chinese wartime literature, 1937-1949

This thesis examines the wartime literary scene in China from 1937-1949. In particular, it investigates one of the paradoxes of the period, namely, that at the moment of greatest urgency, when fiction could seemingly accomplish its original founding soteriological mission to "save the nation," some genuinely committed writers produced works which expressed, at best, ambivalence and ambiguity over conforming to stipulations made regarding how to best support the cause. Such ambivalence appears doubly ironic given the fact that it was articulated amidst nationalistic appeals for the creation of "national forms." Historicizing their situation, one observes that during wartime writers were faced with political and cultural pressures from both within and without. On the political front their literary works were subject to protean proscriptions and prescriptions dictated by various regimes in power; at the same time, on the cultural front they had to contend with burdensome expectations placed on a modern Chinese literature envisioned as possessing a certain social and political transitivity to effect meliorative changes on Chinese society and culture. This research contends that the writers examined attempted to negotiate these demands in their works formally and thematically through an emergent "aesthetics of dissolution." Characterized formally by the breakdown, fragmentation, or dissolution of conventional literary forms, plot structure, and generic classifications, the effect of such an ambivalent and ambiguous aesthetic was to produce hybrid forms and genres situated in between strict formal categories or boundaries and any values or ideologies they may have espoused or promulgated. In this way, writers were able to effect a space within which to write, or "negotiate," the exigencies of the wartime literary scene by making their works less amenable for nationalistic ends based on formal criteria or content alone. After examining the national forms debates in Chapter 1, the thesis will include studies of select works by Shi Tuo, Xiao Hong, and Wang Zengqi in the context of the aesthetics of dissolution noted above.