<em>Fortress Besieged</em>: Cynicism and Qian Zhongshu's Narrative of the Modern Chinese “Self”

As a means of national salvation and mass education, modern Chinese literature gained its cultural and social prominence during the May Fourth Period. However, although one of the most celebrated modern Chinese novels, Fortress Besieged has long been ignored by critics after 1949 and only began to receive renewed attention in the 1980s, largely due to the relaxing political milieu. The novel's marginalization following 1949 occurred largely because Qian did not align himself with his more reform-minded contemporaries and represents a different strand of literary modernism. With a soul significantly enriched by his cosmopolitan visions and literary sensibilities, Qian can be said to possess an alternative understanding of modernity, one which makes this novel a counterdiscourse during an age when literature of the War of Resistance and the Revolutionary Literature constituted the hegemonic narrative modes. Most notably, in Fortress Besieged, Qian de-idealizes the "new women" who are often portrayed as active forces in various progressive projects during and after the May Fourth Movement. Moreover, by calling into question the lofty ideals and taken-for-granted conceptions lauded by his contemporaries, Qian also reveals a profound cynicism, which is itself another factor that made the novel's acceptance politically untenable during the revolutionary period. Thus, in reconsidering the literary space carved out by Qian, we can deepen our understanding of not only the formation of the author's own subjectivities, but also the development of modern Chinese literature more generally.