Eva
2008-01-22 21:49:21 UTC
This thesis will research the images of China in Maugham’s works from the perspective of imagology. In fact, many pioneers have researched the images of China in Western literature since 1920s, though their study was not labeled as imagology then. The predecessors’ achievements include Chen Shouyi’s Ph. D. dissertation The Chinese Influence on British Culture in 18th Century, Qian Zhongshu's China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography, Issue, 1940) and Fan Cunzhong's Chinese Culture in Britain at the Enlightenment Period (Shanghai Foreign Language Teaching Press, 1991). The pioneer scholars researched in the vein of the traditional scholarship of source-finding and their academic achievements provided precious references to us in this field. As far as the current research situations of imagology concerned, Professor Menghua, by compiling the book Imagology of Comparative Literature (Beijing University Press, 2001), contributes most to this field in China. As the first and the most important monograph on imagology, it systematically introduces imagology and it covers the most important papers on imagology written by the pioneers of imagology in France, such as D. H. Pageaux, Moha and several Menghua’s own high-quality papers.