Abstract
Through textual analysis of carefully selected samples from a broad general literary survey based on relevance and prestige, this paper adopts a comparative approach to explore the shifting images of older people in Chinese literature of the past century. Traditionally, filial piety was the principal value for social tranquillity, harmony and stability in China. However, in the early twentieth century, when China suffered a series of national humiliations in the global conflicts with the West, the veneration of the aged attracted attacks from young writers of the New Culture Movement. They viewed the Confucian rational for organizing social order that the young must obey the old as the obstacle to modernization. A shift in depicting old people in literary works accompanied the advent of the anti-traditionalist conviction that it was up to the new youth who would ultimately improve society and salvage the nation. In Mao Zedong’s era, the young were encouraged to use the pretext of class struggle to critique and, in some cases, even to attack the older generations. After Mao’s death in 1976, the internal logic of the development of literature has been shaped by a return of realist aesthetics. At the same time, during this period, no other nation in the world is going through population ageing on the same momentum as China. The topic of ageing has begun to emerge in literary works. Accordingly, analysis of these shifting representations of the old people in literary works offers us an insight into contemporary Chinese society.
Presenters
Lijun BiLecturer, School of Languages Literatures Cultures and Linguistics/Chinese Studies, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AGEING IN CHINESE LITERATURE, AGED CARE IN CHINESE LITERATURE
