Shen Congwen's Literary Regionalism and the Gendered Landscape of Chinese Modernity

ABSTRACT

A significant theme which has emerged in cultural geography has been the relationship between literary representations of landscape and processes of socio-political and economic transformation. One especially important aspect of this theme has been the gendered dimensions of landscape representation. Rarely, however, have cultural geographers examined these issues beyond the context of Western societies. This paper explores the gendered representations of landscape in one of China's most well-known regionalist writers, Shen Congwen. By exploring both Shen's literary works in detail, and the political and cultural climate in which they were written, I argue that the contradictions of modernity in early 20th century China were metaphorically played out by Shen in representations of a gendered frontier landscape. This resulted in a landscape celebrated for its primitive vitality yet at the same time condemned to ruin as modern integration swept across China. While the obvious similarities between Shen's writing and that of Europeans such as Thomas Hardy tempt us to comment on the universal qualities of the experience of modernity, Shen's literary regionalism was in fact firmly anchored to a distinctly Chinese history and geography. For this reason, the themes articulated by Shen Congwen have remained especially important in understanding the complex relationships between modernization, nationalism, and gender in contemporary China.