Alice as an observer: A study on Shen Congwen’s Alice’s Travels in China

This thesis is a literary study of how Shen Congwen applies Alice, an alien adolescent girl, to his novel Alice’s Travels in China (1928). Borrowing the title and major characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Shen Congwen does not intend to write a strictly sequel to the famous work. Instead, he assigns the role of observer to Alice, to whom the various evil in China is exposed. Alice’s innocence and naivete could have served as a weapon to highlight social turmoil and injustice in China. By historicizing the character patterns and close reading, nevertheless, I argue that Shen Congwen fails to reconcile Alice’s characteristics of “alien” and “young” with his social criticism intention seamlessly in this fiction. Shen employs agents to supplement Alice’s limited narrative power, which in turn ruins the uniqueness of the narrative. Though Shen finally recognizes Alice’s agency as an observer in the last chapter of the book, it is not until he creates characters like Xiaoxiao, Sansan, and Cuicui in the early 1930s that he realizes the potential of adolescent female characters to full.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

E Asian Languages & Cultures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Yangyang

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chen, Jingling

• Shen Congwen
• Alice's Travels In China

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Yangyang Liu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121411

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121411