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This is a Literature Review study.

August 17, 2025Open Access

On the Collision of Old and New Cultures in Eileen Chang’s Solitary Island Period--Taking Love in a Fallen City as an Example

Key Points

Cultural collision deeply influences literature and lifestyles during the Shanghai Concession.
Eileen Chang's writings reflect the turmoil of cultural transformation experienced in her era.
Analysis combines close reading and cultural criticism to understand literary expressions in isolation.
Understanding cultural dynamics in literature highlights broader historical processes and personal narratives.

Abstract

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the special characteristics of the Shanghai Concession during the war led to it becoming a unique solitary island. In an isolated island, old and new cultures collide violently. These collisions not only influenced the lifestyles within the tenements, but also had a deeply effect on literature. As a shanghai literary genre writer who grew up in the rented world, Eileen Chang has many traces of the collision of old and new cultures in her works. Understanding the causes of formation behind these traces is of great significance to the literary study of Eileen Chang’s isolated island literature. Taking Love in a Fallen City as an example, this paper will utilize the method of combining textual close reading and cultural criticism to systematically sort out the performance mechanism of cultural collision within the isolated island literature in Love in a Fallen City from the change of material life to the penetration of culture and spirit, aiming to reveal the deep logic of cultural transformation under special historical context from the perspective of literary interiority, and to provide a new dimension of interpretation for the study.

On the Collision of Old and New Cultures in Eileen Chang’s Solitary Island Period--Taking Love in a Fallen City as an Example

Key Points

Abstract

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