1990년대 중국 대륙과 타이완 소설에 나타난 세기말 정서에　대한　트랜스-동아시아적 고찰— 자핑와(贾平凹)의 ≪페이두 废都≫와 주톈원(朱天文)의 ≪세기말의 화려함 世紀末的華麗≫ 중심으로

Abstract

In the 1990s, the sweeping tides of globalization and consumerism profoundly transformed East Asia. Mainland China and Taiwan, respectively undergoing market-oriented economic reforms and political liberalization, experienced intense upheavals in both social structures and cultural psychology. Against this historical backdrop, Jia Pingwa’s “Ruined City” and Chu T’ien-wen’s “Fin-de-siècle Splendour” emerged as seminal literary texts on either side of the Taiwan Strait. Through their vivid depictions of urban experience, individual dislocation, and spiritual emptiness, both novels articulate a literary response to the fin-de-siècle cultural psyche and the crises of modernity. This paper adopts a trans-East Asian cultural perspective, integrating postmodern theory with cultural-psychological analysis to conduct a comparative reading of the two works. It examines how each text, within its distinct socio-political context, reveals symptoms of alienation, identity anxiety, and moral decay under consumer society. Despite the divergent political systems and historical memory frameworks of mainland China and Taiwan, these two novels resonate profoundly in their literary articulation of end-of-century sentiment. The study argues that Ruined City and Fin-de-siècle Splendour not only reflect the acute responses of Chinese and Taiwanese literature to the dilemmas of modernity at the turn of the century, but also embody shared cultural anxieties and temporal markers within a broader East Asian context. Through close textual analysis, this paper seeks to illuminate the diagnostic function of literature amid historical transitions and to deepen a cross-regional understanding of East Asian urban cultural psychology in the 1990s.