2. Literature Review

2.1 Domestic Studies on An American Tragedy

 There are so many articles focused on An American Tragedy published in the past years. When Dreiser’s studies flourished abroad in the 20th century，there are little studies on An American Tragedy in China. Xu Ruzhi, the interpreter of this work, who wrote an article on the features of Dreiser’s artistic creation of the novel in 1982 and thought that Dreiser exposed his blurry socialist ideas in this book. Wu Xiangru and He Changyi orientated An American Tragedy in a perspective of social Darwinism and believed that Dreiser exposed his idea of determinism in the novel under the impact of social Darwinism.

In the 21st century, the discussions and researches on Dreiser and his An American Tragedy become more and more flourished than the decades passed. Yang Jincai studied on the phenomenon that how did money, which stands for social status; influence Clyde in his realistic story. From the different points of view, Yang considered that this novel were prone to realism and took it as a realistic fiction. Jin Li reread the tragedy and pointed out that the novel also reflected the Christianity, lessened and secularized by American society, which can no longer save those who are abandoned to the reality of America. These studies tended to uncover the causes of Clyde’s tragedy and disclose all kinds of relations between the roles of this book and all aspects of American society in different angles of view; it also provide a large quantity of information and enlightenment in Dreiser’s study.