Citizen Culture And Urban Imagination

Recently, along with the rapid pace of urbanization, Urban Literature is developing rapidly, and the research on Urban Literature has gradually come into researchers' perspective. Urban Literature' s connation, its denotation and the relationship between Urban Literature and Urban Culture and so on have become popular research topics. As a result, the theme of this thesis reveals its practical significance. Wang Anyi uses her exquisite composing skills, reflecting the life in lanes in the special period, which unveils the essence of a city from the trivial details of the daily life and is latent the distinctive characteristics of a region and the spiritual particularity of a city. Therefore, on the basis of the close relationship of Urban Literature and its matrix-Urban Culture, the thesis focuses on how the Citizen Culture of Shanghai influences and restricts Wang Anyi' s imagination of the city, and how her imagination of the city reflects her deep feelings on the Citizen Culture of Shanghai.This thesis has seven parts.The exordium retrospects the works which describe Shanghai in the Modern Literary History, and puts forward its research methodology on the basis of the critics' research recapitulation about Wang Anyi' s description on Shanghai for about twenty years.Chapter one is the theoretical basis of this thesis, mainly expatiating the relationship between Citizen Culture and Urban Literature. On the basis of retrospection on the history of both Chinese and western Citizen Culture, it generalizes the harmonized and symbiotic relationship between Urban Culture and Urban Literature, and discusses the formation as well as the characteristics of the Shanghai Citizen Culture, especially its influence on the Shanghai Urban Literature. Chapter two discusses the relationship between Wang Anyi and Shanghai.On the retrospect of Wang Anyi' s lane-life in her childhood, it analyses how she is assimilated by Citizen Culture, and shows the theme of cultural identity from spontaneous creation process to conscious one.Chapter three and Chapter four outline Wang Anyi' s imaginative panorama of the urban city of Shanghai. Shanghai in Wang' s imagination is emphasized on the material aspect of daily life, reflecting three aspects, namely space-time construction of Shanghai citizen society, enjoying rich foods and fine attire and the way of the world. In the influence of the foreign culture, Shanghai Citizen Culture represents the barrier between urban and rural areas, as well as the insular mentality and embarrassing position in the environment of globalization. In order to resist the process to the vulgar reality, Wang Anyi finds the ideal life style in the rural subject.Chapter five analyzes how the Citizen Culture influences Wang Anyi' s aesthetic features on describing Shanghai through aesthetic prototype model in three aspects of stories, characters and narrative language.The conclusion part summarizes the whole paper' s discussion.The appendix is the author' s report of the fieldwork on Wang Anyi' s old residence.