Wumingshi and the Wartime Romances
Wumingshi and the Wartime Romances
Wumingshi wrote several bestselling novels in the 1940s and these are covered in this chapter, including The Woman in the Tower (Tali de nüren) and North Pole Landscape Painting (Beiji fengqinghua). Both works are principally tragic love stories between stunningly beautiful women and accomplished, patriotic, intellectual men, but they also feature distinctive narrative styles and story frameworks that cross the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Wumingshi worked for the anti-Japanese Korean resistance movement in China, and this influenced several of his works. It is shown that, much like Xu Xu, Wumingshi’s work was initially modernist and highly concerned with narrative style, but it eventually transitioned to the popular romances that became hugely popular. Wumingshi’s multivolume grand opus, The Nameless Book (Wumingshu) is also considered here. In this work, he rejected nationalism and ideology and showed a return to narrative experimentation. The early volumes of this were his last published writings before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Keywords: Wumingshi, Wu Mingshi, Bu Naifu, Korean anti-Japanese resistance, The Nameless Book
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