An alienated mind dreaming for integration: Constrained cosmopolitanism in Wumingshi’s ‘Modern Literati Novel’

Mainstream scholarship on Wumingshi – a marginal figure in modern Chinese literary history, but a very popular writer in the 1940s – interprets his writings as ‘neo-romanticism’, ‘late romanticism’ or ‘popular modernism’. This study, through the practice of political hermeneutics, contends that his works are in fact an example of ‘modern literati fiction’ or ‘fiction of ideas’ – a sort of middlebrow fiction for the popular culture market of modern China.