GUO MORUO’S MY CHILDHOOD AND HU SHI’S SELF-NARRATION AT FORTY: COMMON AND SPECIAL FEATURES IN REPRESENTATION OF NEW MAN OF THE NEW ERA

Abstract

The genre of literary autobiography started its formation in China during the New Culture Movement and entered a phase of rapid development by the end of the 1920s. A new understanding of autobiography as a generalized and objectified experience of the writer generated the diversified and syncretic form based on the combination of national tradition and foreign experience. The most representative works of that period are Guo Moruo’s My Childhood (1928) and Hu Shi’s Self-narration at Forty (1933). Based on the main characteristics of the genre of literary autobiography in world literature, the present article attempts to compare these two works in order to identify similarities and differences in authors’ approaches to the representation of personality, as well as to reveal typological features of the Chinese literary autobiography genre of the first half of the 20th century.