2019, Vol., No.44

The Journal of Chinese Cultural Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.44

pISSN : 1598-8503 / eISSN : 2714-0067
https://journal.kci.go.kr/cccs

This study was began to clarify the world after death of Tang Chuanqi(唐傳奇) novels by making an abstraction and analysis of their structure. Tang Chuanqi was a form of short story in the classical language which developed in the Tang dynasty. Many Authors of Tang Chuanqi often thought of death, they were afraid of death, they believed in afterlife. So, what did they imagine for that? What did they want to be in rebirth? Afterlife is the belief that an soul continues to manifest after the death of the physical body. According to novelists's ideas about the afterlife, the soul may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again. Such rebirths and deaths may take place over and over again continuously until the individual gains entry to a spiritual realm or otherworld. Therefore, major views on the afterlife derive from religions. Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that the non-physical essence of a living being starts a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death. It is also called rebirth or transmigration, and is a part of the Saṃsāra doctrine of cyclic existence. A belief in rebirth metempsychosis was held by Greek historic figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, etc. Tang Chuanqi novels of that type were formed literally from superstitious atmospheric force of nature theory including Confucianism, Buddihsm, Taoism, and writers mixed four patterns - many types of soul, rebirth, resuscitation and agnosticism - from these religions for attract the interest of many people.

Karl Mannheim, the sociologist who spent his youth in the midst of war and revolution and started the groundwork for his sociology of knowledge in the early 20th century, highlighted the collective nature of consciousness. According to him, to think is always to participate in or conspire a collective thinking, rather than just anisolated activity of anindividual. As such, thinking acts as criteria of judgement and action for an individual and characterizes one generation as well. The “Educated Youth” is a generation that has common experiences and shares collective mind and thinking. They were Red Guards during the “Cultural Revolution”, then were sent-down to rural areas, and later were brought back to cities as a group. So it is logical to suggest that they as one generation feel a sort of solidarity and have some characteristics in common. It is also not by chance that they got together under the banner of the “Root-seeking Literature.” In order to properly understand the motivation and development of the “Root-seeking Literature” and its seeking roots, it is highly required to consider the writers’ generational characteristics and related narrative characteristics. This approach will be of use in bringing to light the social context and previously unseen dimensions of the literature. Based on this hypothesis, this paper compares two well-known literary groups, the “386 Generation” in Korea and the “Educated Youth” writers in China, exploring how each group’s collective historical experience has shaped the vision of the future respectively and how the vision influenced each group’s literary representation. Firstly, this paper will make a diachronic overview of the “Educated Youth” writers and their literature. Then the case of the “Educated Youth” will be compared to the literary production of the “386 Generation” who is also famous for its unique generational characteristics. In doing so, this paper seeks to cast new and revealing light to each generation’s way of thinking.

Xu Kun is one of the most prominent new writers of the 90s in Chinese contemporary literature. Since the start of her literature work in 1993, she has created a work that focuses on the survival of intellectual class with a dual identity of scholars and writers. <Zao Yu Ai Qing> take the male character as the main character, describes male-female relationships that are dominated by money in a commercialized Chinese society. She was generally regarded as a scholarly writer, but her short story the <Chu Fang>, created in 1997, is evaluated as a work by a pure feminist writer. Chinese society has been in the 90s, with the development of market economy, the position of intellectuals has been pushed to the periphery of society. Of course, female literature has been pushed around more. This paper is based on the concept of 90s, which is a specific time frame set of space, would like to study how the economic development of China has affected the gender identity of women and men. In this paper, a comparative study of <Chu Fang> and <Zao Yu Ai Qing> was carried out in four parts, in the first chapter, discussed the return of knowledge women to the kitchen. A woman who refuses the kitchen returns to the kitchen for love but eventually is rejected by the men she loves. Through the study of Chapter 2, we can see that the success of women has a contradictory relation with the gender identity of women. In the third chapter, analyzed the relationship between business and true love for divorced middle-age women. In the last chapter, learned about a new group of women who emerged as the background of Chinese society in the 90′s.