The Way to Imagine Hong Kong (A Collection of Essays on Hong Kong Fiction, 1945~2000)

Author: Cai Yihuai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: Hong Kong is a magnificent city, but also a city of sorrow. This book is divided into two parts. The upper part, A Legend of the Pearl River: A Study of Character Images in Hong Kong Fiction After World War II, is the author's doctoral dissertation, while the lower part, Narrating Hong Kong: "Hong Kong Image" and Narrative Paradigms in Hong Kong Fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, is the author's master's thesis. The upper part examines Hong Kong fiction from the twenty-five years after World War II (with a focus on the 1950s and 1960s), emphasizing the analysis and discussion of character images in Hong Kong fiction. The text strives to study this period's Hong Kong fiction as a whole, analyzing its imagery and metaphors, summarizing and discovering the shared creative concerns, patterns, and unique creative elements and motifs in Hong Kong fiction. The lower part focuses on examining and analyzing the "Hong Kong image," "Hong Kong consciousness," and narrative paradigms in Hong Kong fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, Hong Kong was undergoing an economic transition and a political transition, and under this historical backdrop, Hong Kong fiction also presented a new structure, showcasing distinct urban characteristics and a strong local consciousness. This book will dedicate itself to analyzing the character images in Hong Kong fiction, tracing their genealogy, revealing the archetypes and variations of the "Pearl River," and understanding their connotations. In terms of theoretical methodology, on one hand, through a tragic examination, it conducts a specific aesthetic analysis of individual works, conducts a humanistic analysis of the characters in the fiction, and explores their internal conflicts; on the other hand, it draws on the method of archetypal criticism, treating the entire post-war Hong Kong fiction as a system, analyzing the internal connections between works and works, and between characters and characters, in order to break through traditional approaches to Hong Kong literature research and offer new interpretations from fresh perspectives.