Su Manshu: la modernità incompiuta o l'incompiutezza del moderno?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Chinese pre-modern writer Su Manshu (1884-1918): novelist, poet, Buddhist monk and revolutionary. He wrote a novel and a few short stories betokening the bith of a new modern fiction during the May Fourth Era. Through the analysis of some narrative patterns, we try to demonstrate that the coexistence of traditional and modern elements in his fictional works, as well as his being caught between two lands (China and Japan), two cultures (Chinese and Western), two styles of life (religious faith and worldliness) and two epochs (late imperial China and republican China) make up his "unfinished" project of modernity.