Abstract: The disastrous wars at the beginning of the 20th century brought about the end-of-the-century mood. Western writers created a world of ruins in their novels, making the image of ruins a universal metaphor of human experience. The Chinese modern literature at the same period of time, however, did not have the soil for such a literary genre. Eileen Chang, with keen sensibility and self acceptance of foreign literature, touched the pulse of Western ruins aesthetics by creating literary works with the style of ruins aesthetics. Describing the exile of modern society and the alienation between reality and tradition and embodying the confusion and despair of the people, ruins literature expresses the deep worries about and reflections on the process of human civilization of Chinese and Western writers. Through the writing of ruins, both Chinese and Western writers give a new meaning to the broken world. Ruins are not only the memory of time, but also a medium to wake up the past and record the present. Time has become the manifestation of the past in the present and is thus recognized in the present. The Chinese and Western writing of ruins, therefore, expresses a common vision of salvation by creating a fragmented world of ruins represented in fables.

Key words: ruins writing, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Eileen Chang