Chapter Three: Romancing Landscape and Human Animal

Abstract

Sensitive to modernity's estrangement of human bonds to nature and the rural lifeworld, Shen Congwen affirms an ecological understanding of writing and life. The writing self sinks its roots into nature and enmeshes with nonhuman worlds. Animistic language immerses bodily sensations, pleasure, and feelings in organic environs, connecting humans to the millennial entwinement of the archaic ways of living with the soil, landscape, and the earth. Targeting the modern city's erosion of rural simplicity, authenticity, and vitality, Shen's ecological writing evinces a deep appreciation of unconventional sexuality, affirming the biological and ecological union between inner and outer nature.