Psychological Realism finds its expression in Eileen Chang’s works of fiction in the 1940s (“The Golden Cangue”, “Love in a Fallen City” and “The Jasmine Tea”), adding a touch of unique Modernist aesthetics to the literary texts. By analyzing and summarizing the rhetorical techniques as well as the stylistic characteristics of these texts, we could see that Eileen Chang consciously adopted stream of consciousness, free indirect speech and internal monologues to enrich the connotations of her works of fiction, which perfectly combine classical Chinese aesthetics with Western Modernism. The “discovery of the Interiority,” a defining feature of modern Japanese literature according to Kojin Karatani, was achieved by mild or stark contrast in Eileen Chang’s fiction in the 1940s.

Keywords: Eileen Chang; Interiority; stylistic characteristics; Western Modernity; Psychological Realism

A cigarette advertisement in 1933 featured the film star Hu Die in two different forms—sketch and photographic portrait—on the same page, creating a self-reflexive perspective of women’s situation when they were situated in business and arts by connecting the two portraits with a glance. This research starts with Hu Die’s cigarette advertisement, and analyzes how the visual spectacle created by the “double shooting technique” in the film “Kong Gu Lan” （《空谷兰》）replaces the reflection on women’s independence with the narration of family ethics. In Ding Ling’s novel “Meng Ke”（《梦珂》）, the protagonist projects a “second self” image in the mirror with the stimulation of cigarettes, which enables herself to accomplish the transformation from a student to a film star, and legitimizes the gaze relationship and desire structure with self-empathy, thus participating in the reproduction of the gaze mechanism. Ai Xia also created a fictional “second self” when she adapted the novel “A Modern Woman” （《现代一女性》） to a film script by rewriting the end of the story, which demonstrates the inner division and real dilemma of the modern girl and expresses the intrinsic sorrow which could have been articulated with the stimulation of cigarettes. By tracking the dual visual intoxication which crosses different genres, flowing among cigarette advertisements, early films, novels, and screenplays, the research probes the complex relationships among cigarettes, female, and subjectivity.

“Shengjiang Shengjing Tu” was published in 1884, in which the “Chinese Theater”featuring Yang Yuelou as the main character on stage. Its modern element, along with the previous report on the “Yang Yuelou Case” in Shen Bao Newspaper reflects the creator's sense of modernity. Through the “Yang Yuelou Case” in Shen Bao Newspaper and the “Chinese Theater” in “Shenjiang Shengjing Tu”, we can see the interconnection of modern identity among the famous characters, the media and the city, which reveals the emerging city culture in the late Qing Dynasty. The modern identity constructed by the famous characters, the media and the city leads to the fact that the masterminds and creators behind the scene, while constructing the image of Yang Yuelou and the symbol of Shanghai's modernity, also constructed their own identities; and through the famous characters and the media, they constructed the modernity of the city of Shanghai. In this way, the famous character Yang Yuelou, the “Yang Yuelou Case”, and the “Shenjiang Shengjing Tu” essentially refer to Shanghai's urban modernity and the modern significance of the newspaper publication industry of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty, and signify modern journalists’ understanding of Shanghainess based on the cultural dimension since the opening of the port of Shanghai.

As the inaugural tyrant of H.G. Wells' technocratic utopia, the figure of the Invisible Man, who possesses technological mastery but lacks moral compass, serves not only as an embodiment of technological threats but also as the presentation of the institutional and ethical vacuum that technological advancement inevitably brings. Since its initial cinematic adaptation in 1933, with Wells' personal involvement, the original work has become an enduring commercial film intellectual property. The Western world has subsequently produced nine representative films based on this story. The series entered China in the same year of its premiere, propelled by the intellectual community's admiration for Wells, and merged with the traditional Chinese imagination of the invisible man in Taoism, leading to the creation of a series of new works themed around the figure. The "invisible" as a modern imaginary of technological threats has initiated a diachronic contemplation across multiple contexts and national borders over a century of cinematic wandering, in the form of a thought experiment.