Abstract: The marital narratives in agricultural cooperative novels of the “Seventeen Years” Period (1949-1966), i.e. from founding of the People's Republic through beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution, transcended established literary conventions, exhibiting distinct new characteristics. Traditional plot elements–mate selection, marriage, and divorce–were imbued with fresh political metaphoric functions, revealing complex interactions between political discourse and rural ethics. While the fusion of romance and politics articulated the vision of a community of ethical politics at a certain time, it also showed profound contradictions between idealism and reality, as well as between individual and collective imperatives. As the agricultural cooperative movement accelerated in its later phases, the novels' political narratives faced crises of logical rupture and didactic limitations. Within this context, the rediscovery of implicit rural ethical norms within marital relationships provided a pivot on which the political narrative of the time operated. The mechanisms of acquaintance societies, matchmaking customs and real-life experience provided an internal logical anchor for politicized marital narratives, enabling modern revolutionary ideals to take root in rural communities.

Key words: political metaphor, rural ethics, Seventeen Years (1949-1966) literature, marriage