Abstract
Carson McCullers has been twice introduced to China and has provoked two waves of a “McCullers craze” since 1979. What strikes Chinese readers most is McCullers’ scathing representation of loneliness in her fiction. McCullers’ “loneliness” has different meanings to two successive generations of Chinese readers: for the first, it signifies isolation within a community, and for the other, it is more closely aligned with the concept of alienation in a crowd. This chapter aims to resolve the myth of the “McCullers complex” among Chinese readers and reveals the “Chinese perspective” of McCullers’ reception and research in China by exploring the different social contexts of the two waves of the “McCullers craze,” which occurred in the early 1980s and the late 2000s respectively.
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Bin, L. (2016). Seeking the Meaning of Loneliness: Carson McCullers in China. In: Graham-Bertolini, A., Kayser, C. (eds) Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century. American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40292-5_13
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