Library

In midsummer, the branches and leaves are luxuriant, and we meet each other year after year and never leave each other year after year.

This book takes as the research object literary narratives and related texts about the image of farmers since China's urbanization (starting with the rural reform in 1978), explores how literature since the 1980s has imagined the image of farmers, and discusses the complex reasons behind it. On the one hand, this book analyzes the character design, storyline, and narrative structure surrounding farmers in contemporary literary works. On the other hand, the historical context, ideological culture, and meaning structure related to the generated text are also the focus of this book. Through the analysis of six types of farmers' images and their related narratives, this book attempts to sort out a complete narrative logic. In this narrative logic, we can clearly see how the originally self-sufficient farmers fell into confusion and marginalization in the process of China's urbanization, and were even completely included in the urban orbit, losing their farmers' identity and subjectivity. However, at the same time, this narrative logic also reflects how farmers develop a self-awareness to construct and fight for new subjects and identities in a state of "marginal" and "suffering", and may even develop an emerging subjectivity from this.