This thesis is focused on the new writers who appeared in Shanghai during the
Japanese Occupation between December 1941 and August 1945. The rise of these new
writers to fame and their subsequent disappearance from the literary scene were
consistent with the fall and liberation o f Shanghai. In the meantime, their appearance and
disappearance were parallel with the success and decline of magazines published in
Shanghai during that period as well. Both the magazines and their editors played
significant roles in promoting the new writers into the literary arena.
The war disrupted the development of literature, their writing "nourishment" mostly
depended on the literary resources which had been stored up in Shanghai since the late
Qing. My discussion of these eight new writers, Zhang Ailing, Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen,
Tang Xuehua, Zheng Dingwen, Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi, progresses through an
analysis of the elements of region, literature, and war.
While most of the female writers' themes were focused on love, mundane love or
God's love, the male writers were either more interested in setting their stories on
Chinese native soil like Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi; or personal concerns and
anxieties regarding the future such as Zheng Dingwen. Among her contemporaries,
Zhang Ailing is the most successful and the most influential.
These new writers did not go through the baptism of the May Fourth Movement, and
had less of a moral burden than their predecessors did. Thus they had more freedom to
develop their writings— although the freedom was confined due to a depressed political
and social climate. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/10201 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Chen, Yi-Chen |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 9349710 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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