A New Theory Of "Novel Of Sad Sentiments"

In the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China,"novel of love" was popular,among which "Sentimental Novel"(ai-ch’ing hsiao-shuo)[1]led the literary world in the early Republic of China.The heat wave of "mourning" finally fell with the rise of new literature of the May Fourth Movement.The "mandarin duck and butterfly fiction"represented by "Sentimental Novel" is criticized by the "old literature",and has long been regarded as the object of criticism and negation.This negative narrative has always been the standard writing of literary history.It was not until the late 20th century,when the value of literature in the late Qing Dynasty was re-examined by the academic circle,that the traditional view of "Sentimental Novel" was changed.In this paper,"Sentimental Novel" as the research object,with the help of Raymond Williams’s "structure of feeling",explore the emotional problems of "Sentimental Novel",combined with emotion theory,emotion genealogy,social psychology,narratology and other relevant theories,This paper attempts to re-interpret the emotional structure of"Sentimental Novel",which were prevalent in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China,to explore the awakening and crisis of emotional subjects,and to provide an emotional cognitive dimension of "Sentimental Novel",so as to re-examine the social and historical significance and literary history value of "Sentimental Novel".This paper holds that the emotion of "Sentimental Novel"(ai-ch’ing hsiao-shuo)is a kind of modern individual emotion,the author of "Sentimental Novel" constructs with the extreme expression of novel,shows the self-inherent emotion of modern individuals,and forms an "emotional community" on the emerging "literary field",which has the significance of social control.It is also the refraction of the reconstruction of "emotional polity" in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China.This structure of"mourning",which was criticized as "irrational" at that time,objectively promoted the"emotion" from the "modern" and "scientific" to the social sense,and provided a certain social emotional thrust for the release of the enlightenment passion of the May Fourth Movement.This kind of "mourning" structure also stubbornly continued to the May Fourth new literature in the context.Therefore,when starting from the dimension of emotion,"novel of sad sentiments" has a dimension of emotional value beyond the enlightenment discourse of the May Fourth Movement,so as to place "Sentimental Novel" in a broader emotional vein of Chinese literature.The first chapter of this paper,based on relevant literature and historical data,sorts out the development process of "Sentimental Novel" in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China,selects the works of representative writers for interpretation and analysis,and divides "Sentimental Novel" into three different development stages with time as the ordinate,and briefly summarizes the development process of "Sentimental Novel" from the late Qing Dynasty to the May Fourth Movement.The second chapter focuses on the "structure of feeling" of "Sentimental Novel" as the framework,combined with human emotion science,social psychology and other theories to explore why in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China called for the sense of "feeling",and why the "sad" keynote presented the cultural construction behind the excavation and the narrative mode of "mourning";The third chapter focuses on the construction process of the emotional subject of "mourning",and discusses the triple crises of "mourning" individuals from the standpoint of the construction of modern individuals.The fourth chapter further explores the emotional value of "novel of sad sentiments" by combining relevant theories of sociology and emotional pedigree,analyzes whether the so-called "irrational" "novel of sad sentiments" have social emotional significance to the rise of the May Fourth Movement,and explores the historical and social significance of "novel of sad sentiments" itself.