| Abstract: Mountain Writing constitutes a significant tradition within Chinese literary history. Since China's modern transformation, Mountain Writing, under the influence of intellectual currents of enlightenment, national strengthening, and progress, has become the object of being interrogated, and in enlightening narratives, the mountainous regions have been modified as the geography of being criticized which is isolated from modern civilization, almost synonymous with poverty, backwardness and ignorance, standing in stark opposition to modern civilization. Jia Pingwa’s novels—The Mountain Whisperer, Shan Ben, and Qinling Ji, transcend the entrenched urban/rural binary characteristic of earlier modern narratives, and restore the Qinling range to its primordial significance as mountainous territory. These three novels position the Qinling Mountains as their central subject, meticulously documenting their natural ecology, human activities, social organizations, and historical transformations. The novels demonstrate distinctive philosophical and artistic innovations in their epistemological framing of the Qinling world, their construction of integrated natural-social-cultural spatial landscapes, their implementation of topological narrative structures, and their deployment of materialist rhetoric and characterization techniques. Collectively, Jia Pingwa’s “Qinling Series” constitutes a pioneering exploration of “Chinese modernization” within contemporary Chinese fiction, offering considerable value as an exemplar in this emerging discourse. |
