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.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Marketdocumentary films of Pare Lorentz, to take a few examples—often imagined apreindustrial republic of virtuous small farmers or artisans as a way of gauging how America and its people had gone astray.In an oppositional variant of republicanism which Michael Denning has called “the Decline and Fall of theLincoln Republic,” this virtuous world is betrayed by robber barons and gilded dreams of empire (168).But because of the generally white homogeneity ofthis imagined past, the pluralism of much of this work is more in line with“We’re the people” rather than “The People’s Century” (barring Caldwell, as I have argued).5It is also important to note that this agrarian nostalgia intersected withextremely popular representations of China in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in the work of Pearl Buck and Edgar Snow.It should come as no surprise thattwo of the key writers who “translated” Asia for U.S.audiences deployed such yeoman figures as well.Buck’s best-sellers The Good Earth (1931) and Dragon Seed (1942) centered on common Chinese farmers deeply wedded to the soil, while the reportage and topical nonfiction of Edgar Snow, a Popular Front journalist for the Saturday Evening Post, turned Chinese communists into Jeffersonian icons.Both of these authors avoided representing the Chinese in terms of the absolute difference necessary to Yellow Peril discourse.In a U.S.mass culture permeated with the hard, anti-Chinese racism inherent in the figures of thecoolie and Dr.Fu Man Chu, they participated in shifting public discourse on the Chinese away from such images.The results were quite significant.As Colleen Lye has written, the mid-century narratives of Buck and Snow “inscribed Asian politics into the very heart of American national identity” (143).But in doing so, they problematically—and unrealistically—elided any substantive culturaldifferences whatsoever.At the very top of the best-seller list in 1931 and 1932, Buck’s The Good Earth was tremendously influential.In his 1958 study of American views toward Asia, Harold Isaacs claimed that this novel defined the impressions of influential Americans toward the Chinese more than any other text, adding that allinterviewees who spontaneously cited Buck as the main source of their imagesof the Chinese viewed them as “a wonderfully attractive people” (155).In the 1930s and 1940s, Buck’s work was hailed by mainstream and left critics for cutting through the Yellow Peril racism of novelists like Sax Rohmer, the creator of Dr.Fu Manchu, and she was often considered a goodwill ambassador betweenChina and the United States.However, her stories of Chinese life were increasingly placed alongside Rohmer’s mysteries in the dubious canon of Orientalist literature after the Yellow Power movements of the late 1960s enabled a greaterCarlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Market117space for Asian American literary self-expression (Allmendinger 361, 370, Lye 204–5).6The Good Earth centers on the character Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan, who begin the story as small farmers in northern Anhwei province in China.Through hard work, frugality, and tenacious devotion to the land, they over-come all obstacles and accumulate a fortune, surpassing the decadent land-owners of the House of Hwang in which O-Lan began as a slave.Wang Lungbecomes as decadent as the family he surpassed, however, turning his back onthe moral clarity of farming to pursue the luxury symbolized by a concubinenamed Lotus.The simple, hard-working O-Lan dies after his long neglect, andhe moves into town with his sons to reside in the former House of Hwang.Meanwhile, all his children have become estranged from the land in variousways.Eventually, he forsakes this affluent yet alienated existence to return to his original house, spending the rest of his days as a simple farmer.But the novel ends on a bitter note, for Wang Lung overhears his sons discussing a plan to sell the land he loves so dearly after his death.The story is both agrarian and republican in that it creates a polar opposi-tion between plain living, frugality, small landownership, and virtue on the one hand, and a frivolous, unscrupulous, and urban culture on the other.Holdingthe producerist values of the yeoman farmer, Wang Lung rejects the values ofboth the landless proletariat below him and the decadent aristocracy above; he instead favors the simple pleasure of tilling the soil, a pleasure not reducible to financial gain.During a famine that temporarily throws his family into the ranks of the urban proletariat, Wang Lung reflects: “He belonged, not to this scum which clung to the walls of a rich man’s house; nor did he belong to the rich man’s house.He belonged to the land and he could not live with any full-ness until he felt the land under his feet and followed a plow in the springtime and bore a scythe in his hand at harvest” (123) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Marketdocumentary films of Pare Lorentz, to take a few examples—often imagined apreindustrial republic of virtuous small farmers or artisans as a way of gauging how America and its people had gone astray.In an oppositional variant of republicanism which Michael Denning has called “the Decline and Fall of theLincoln Republic,” this virtuous world is betrayed by robber barons and gilded dreams of empire (168).But because of the generally white homogeneity ofthis imagined past, the pluralism of much of this work is more in line with“We’re the people” rather than “The People’s Century” (barring Caldwell, as I have argued).5It is also important to note that this agrarian nostalgia intersected withextremely popular representations of China in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in the work of Pearl Buck and Edgar Snow.It should come as no surprise thattwo of the key writers who “translated” Asia for U.S.audiences deployed such yeoman figures as well.Buck’s best-sellers The Good Earth (1931) and Dragon Seed (1942) centered on common Chinese farmers deeply wedded to the soil, while the reportage and topical nonfiction of Edgar Snow, a Popular Front journalist for the Saturday Evening Post, turned Chinese communists into Jeffersonian icons.Both of these authors avoided representing the Chinese in terms of the absolute difference necessary to Yellow Peril discourse.In a U.S.mass culture permeated with the hard, anti-Chinese racism inherent in the figures of thecoolie and Dr.Fu Man Chu, they participated in shifting public discourse on the Chinese away from such images.The results were quite significant.As Colleen Lye has written, the mid-century narratives of Buck and Snow “inscribed Asian politics into the very heart of American national identity” (143).But in doing so, they problematically—and unrealistically—elided any substantive culturaldifferences whatsoever.At the very top of the best-seller list in 1931 and 1932, Buck’s The Good Earth was tremendously influential.In his 1958 study of American views toward Asia, Harold Isaacs claimed that this novel defined the impressions of influential Americans toward the Chinese more than any other text, adding that allinterviewees who spontaneously cited Buck as the main source of their imagesof the Chinese viewed them as “a wonderfully attractive people” (155).In the 1930s and 1940s, Buck’s work was hailed by mainstream and left critics for cutting through the Yellow Peril racism of novelists like Sax Rohmer, the creator of Dr.Fu Manchu, and she was often considered a goodwill ambassador betweenChina and the United States.However, her stories of Chinese life were increasingly placed alongside Rohmer’s mysteries in the dubious canon of Orientalist literature after the Yellow Power movements of the late 1960s enabled a greaterCarlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Market117space for Asian American literary self-expression (Allmendinger 361, 370, Lye 204–5).6The Good Earth centers on the character Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan, who begin the story as small farmers in northern Anhwei province in China.Through hard work, frugality, and tenacious devotion to the land, they over-come all obstacles and accumulate a fortune, surpassing the decadent land-owners of the House of Hwang in which O-Lan began as a slave.Wang Lungbecomes as decadent as the family he surpassed, however, turning his back onthe moral clarity of farming to pursue the luxury symbolized by a concubinenamed Lotus.The simple, hard-working O-Lan dies after his long neglect, andhe moves into town with his sons to reside in the former House of Hwang.Meanwhile, all his children have become estranged from the land in variousways.Eventually, he forsakes this affluent yet alienated existence to return to his original house, spending the rest of his days as a simple farmer.But the novel ends on a bitter note, for Wang Lung overhears his sons discussing a plan to sell the land he loves so dearly after his death.The story is both agrarian and republican in that it creates a polar opposi-tion between plain living, frugality, small landownership, and virtue on the one hand, and a frivolous, unscrupulous, and urban culture on the other.Holdingthe producerist values of the yeoman farmer, Wang Lung rejects the values ofboth the landless proletariat below him and the decadent aristocracy above; he instead favors the simple pleasure of tilling the soil, a pleasure not reducible to financial gain.During a famine that temporarily throws his family into the ranks of the urban proletariat, Wang Lung reflects: “He belonged, not to this scum which clung to the walls of a rich man’s house; nor did he belong to the rich man’s house.He belonged to the land and he could not live with any full-ness until he felt the land under his feet and followed a plow in the springtime and bore a scythe in his hand at harvest” (123) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]