THE ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION OF CROSS-CULTURAL COMMONALITY IN THE TRILOGY OF PEARL S. BUCK

Abstract

The encounter between civilisations has long been one of the central preoccupations of world literature, and the question of what human beings share across cultural boundaries remains as urgent today as ever. The prose of Pearl S. Buck, an American writer shaped by a lifelong experience of both China and the West, offers a distinctive artistic answer to this question. In her trilogy narrating the fate of three generations of a Chinese peasant family, cross-cultural commonality is not asserted as an abstract idea but embodied through a coherent system of artistic means. This article analyses how such commonality is represented in the trilogy, arguing that it is realised through the principle of narrative economy, whereby minimal linguistic means generate maximal psychological and cultural content. The study proposes a two-layered model in which an axiological universality shared by East and West is joined inseparably to a culturally specific semantic particularity, and it shows that commonality is figured not as a static condition but as a dynamic process unfolding along a trajectory of “harmony, conflict, re-conceptualisation.” The findings offer a fresh basis for reevaluating Buck’s work within psychopoetics and cross-cultural poetics.