Identity Displacement and Human Awakening Amidst Survival Predicament: A Brief Analysis of Shen Congwen’s The Husband

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_97How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Identity Displacement; Human Awakening; Shen Congwen; The Husband

Abstract

Shen Congwen’s short story The Husband describes a tale about boat prostitutes in Xiangxi, providing reference materials for people to understand the distorted social ethics and the alienation of people caused by urban civilization at that time. It shows the inner struggle and resistance of a countryman when facing the invasion of urban civilization, and the process of reshaping his self-worth in the resistance. This article, through textual analysis and dialectical analysis, demonstrates the impact of excessive commercialization and changes in economic forms on the alienation of people’s morality and the deviation of identity cognition, as well as the budding of human awakening and resistance driven by primitive emotions, social status, and various complex social causes. It reveals Shen Congwen’s praise for natural human beings to a certain extent. However, at the same time, this excessive commercialization also reflects the irreversibility of human alienation, providing explanations and analyses for the ultimately romanticized and illusory return to the homeland, highlighting that this is an impossible return. This also shows Shen Congwen’s thoughts on breaking through the modernization of the countryside.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shiqing Cui
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/26
TI  - Identity Displacement and Human Awakening Amidst Survival Predicament: A Brief Analysis of Shen Congwen’s The Husband
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Culture, Design and Social Development (CDSD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 879
EP  - 889
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_97
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_97
ID  - Cui2026
ER  -