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Creation Society Fiction and the Subjective Quality of May Fourth Literature

  • Christopher T. Keaveney
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Part of the Comparative Perspectives on Modern Asia book series (CPMA)

Abstract

In attempting to address matters pertaining to self-referentiality in fiction, this study begins from the premise that all fiction can be considered self-referential insofar as, by necessity, it reflects the interests and biases of the author. Patricia Meyer Spacks offers the following succinct statement about the fundamental self-referentiality at work in all fiction:

It can be argued that all fiction ultimately constitutes autobiography, the artist inventing whatever the purported aim of his creation, only a series of metaphors for the self. Conversely, one can maintain that all autobiography is fiction, the imposition of form and discovery of meaning automatically converting life into its imitation1

The second part of Spackss statement correctly acknowledges the essential kinship of fiction and autobiography and recognizes the fact that the attempt to separate them into discrete forms offers a number of serious obstacles.

Keywords

Chinese Student Chinese Literature Exchange Student Fourth Period Chinese Writer 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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    Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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© Christopher T. Keaveney 2004

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