March 27, 2006,SIS
Days ago, the National Social Sciences Foundation Program-- "The English Novel and the Change of Social Values in the Course
of Industrialization" (No.01BWW010) directed by Professor Yin Qiping from SIS --was evaluated as "excellent" from the
National Planning Office of Social Sciences.
The project proposal was approved in 2001 and with years of collaborative efforts of the research group, who have by now published
over 20 items of achievement at different stages. "Querying the Discourse of 'Progress': the New Novel in the 19th Century
Britain", a monograph by Professor Yin Qiping is among one of them. This book is a representative model of transformation
research and interdisciplinary research, covering not only English literature but also philosophy, sociology and economics, etc.
This project employs one crucial point of Williams that the new novel in the 19th century Britain unveils the structure of feeling
which cannot be observed in the "official history". Based on large quantities of analysis of concrete works, the project puts
forward, for the first time in the academic world home and abroad, that the most outstanding character of the English novel in the
19th century is the query on the discourse of "progress".
The main academic importance of this project lies in its systematic and detailed demonstration of the historical functions or
values of the outstanding novels in the 19th century Britain, indicating that novelists prone to be more sensitive about the
problems resulting from social transformation than others (including historians and sociologists) at an earlier time. Each novel
analyzed in this project functions as a clear picture of the complicated feelings that weighed on the people but has not yet
been recorded in history during the transformation from agricultural society to industrial society. In the past few decades, the
debates on the borderline between fictional stories and historical facts in the academic world never cease fire and this
project can be regarded as an intervenor in this fierce battle.
As for the main applied values, it helps to work out the way of using the lesson from the Britain social transformation as reference.
Our country is now at the speeding stage of industrialization and figuring out the way to solve the problems between traditional
social values and industrial development has become a pressing task. In precaution, it is necessary for us to go deep into the wrong
doings of the western world in this field. From this perspective, this project has practical importance as it presents deeper thinking
than the historical books with a richly depicted historical view.
