Prima della rivoluzione. Tradizione e modernità in due novelle di Bao Tianxiao, «Qie ming bo» 妾命薄 e «Yi lü ma» 一縷麻

Popular fiction was a particularly successful trend in fiction from the late Qing era through the Republican period. In this fiction, a nostalgic and sentimental preservation of the Ming-Qing cult of qing 情 is clearly visible: romance and freedom of love are the expressions of a modern consciousness which makes individuals out of subjects of the traditional moral code. In a circular move to find solutions to national salvation and social change, sentimental literature searched for a compromise between tradition and modernity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Aufhebung of the old contributed to accommodate a still unchartered modernity in two short stories by Bao Tianxiao. The intertextual analysis will show the development of a persistent ambivalence between progress and nostalgia.