From Peach Blossom Land to Yellow Earth: The Transformation of the “Rural” Context of Chinese Literature from a Postcolonial Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Peach Blossom Land; Yellow Earth; the Other; Third Space

Abstract

From Shen Congwen’s Border Town to Wang Zengqi’s The Love Story of a Young Monk to Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Frog, the image of the Chinese “rural” gradually changed from the idealistic “Peach Blossom Land,” the traditional Chinese spiritual home of harmony and idyll, to the “Yellow Earth,” the feudal and backward barren countryside in the Chinese context. The latter tends to resemble the Chinese countryside in the Western imagination, and the connotation and function of the “rural” context has changed. In contrast, Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain, which also belongs to Chinese local literature, breaks the boundaries of the opposition between the two and constructs a hybrid intermediate state countryside, providing a feasible way to create contemporary local literature. Through a close reading, analysis and comparison of the above-mentioned historical works from a postcolonial perspective, this paper explores the transformation of the “rural” context in shaping the characters’ love, kinship, social relations, and customs, reflecting the functional change of the “rural” context from showing human beauty to human evil, and the influence of Western centrism on reshaping the contemporary “rural” context. The local literature of the future can learn from the “Third Space” that embraces the culture of the rural areas and the modern civilization created by the White Deer Plain and write about the development of China’s rural areas with the conflict and harmony between various characters, and the collision and interplay between the rural and urban areas.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jie Tao
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/12/31
TI  - From Peach Blossom Land to Yellow Earth: The Transformation of the “Rural” Context of Chinese Literature from a Postcolonial Perspective
BT  - Proceedings of the  2023 5th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 146
EP  - 159
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-170-8_16
ID  - Tao2023
ER  -