The Real World in Fiction: A Comparative Literary Perspective on the Portrayal of China in the Early Twentieth-Century in Midnight and on a Chinese Screen

Abstract

Both Chinese and foreign writers cast their eyes on China during the early twentieth-century, when China was at an intersection of feudalism and modernism. They depicted and recorded this complex period from their own perspectives in different literary forms. Among them, Mao Dun and Maugham present the 1920s and 1930s China from different angles through their literary works Midnight and On a Chinese Screen, respectively. There are lots of research analyzing the two works from various perspectives, but few put them together by doing comparative studies of the early twentieth-century Chinese society and people. Therefore, this essay aims to analyze the two works together from a comparative perspective and offer a more comprehensive view through the analysis. Besides official historical records, literary and visual arts are also chroniclers of history. Fictional works might also provide the real world, even with detailed social contradictions, and even the inner world of people under specific writing purposes, like what Mao Dun and Maugham held. This comparative research focuses on the depiction of China from both domestic and foreign perspectives and analyzes the narrative of the two literary works from the fictional realism in characters as well as social and natural environments. Since the two writers held different viewpoints with diverse social backgrounds, their understanding of Chinese society and people varied accordingly. Through the comparative analysis, this research explores a great deal of the historical value of these two literary works that offer a more enlightened way to link the real historical events and the fictional characters, as well as a fuller picture of China at that time.