Family, Society, and Tradition in Jin Ping Mei
1984; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/009770048401000402
ISSN1552-6836
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoFamily life has been a prominent theme in Chinese literature for several centuries. Well-known novels and plays of the Republican era, like Ba Jin's Family and Cao Yu's Spring Thunder, are very accessible to Western readers, describing Chinese families in terms that we can easily understand. Especially in Family, an illusion of reportage is created, a sense that this is how a Chinese family would have met the stresses of that era. But there is no reportage unmediated by the expectations of writer and reader, and in these two cases our very sense of familiarity can help us to understand the expectations of Ba Jin and Cao Yu and their public. This particular novel and play (and many like them) look familiar to Westerners because their authors adopted the conventions of Western fiction and drama. (Spring Thunder makes recognizable use of the Oedipus myth.) This adoption of Western literary forms does not make Family or Spring Thunder inaccurate as depictions of the Chinese family, but it does add a dimension to which the historian as well as the literary specialist should pay heed. The in these novels are not simply data about family composition; they are also data about cultural self-confidence. The Chinese families in these two works are drawn in Western perspective, with a resultant shift in the explanation given for each family's decline. The drama of the
Referência(s)