| Among Chinese contemporary writers, An-yi Wang has always been a highly creative one, full of vitality. She has been devoted to literature with painstaking efforts since the end of the1970s when her writing career just began, and has made brilliant achievements.In the1990s, An-yi Wang began to teach Fiction Theory in Fudan University. Citing and approving Nabokov’s remark "Great novels are great fairy tales", she made her own summary that what a novel depicts is not the reality but one’s inner world, and its value lies in its contribution to the expansion and construction of spiritual palace. To explore An-yi Wang’s "Spiritual World" she has built for more than30years with great pain and efforts, it is necessary to study the profound influence of foreign literature on her literary creation. An-yi Wang’s works, especially the representative ones featuring style transformation, all fully demonstrate deep impact from foreign writers and foreign literary ideological trends. If her works are analyzed in comparison to corresponding foreign writers and their works, such as in terms of material drawing, theme defining, narrative methods, plotting, and language style, we can see clearly how this female author has been gradually influenced by foreign literature, especially western literature.Just like many authors whose writing career started in the early1980s, An-yi Wang was mainly under influences of realist works by western authors when making her literary debut. Humanism and realism in Russian literature are the leading reference resources in An-yi Wang’s literary creation at its early stage. The character images and language styles in her early works are obviously traceable to Soviet works. With admiration, Wang has also learned from Jane Austen, a famous English novelist, to express a grand theme with trivial matters. Indeed, Wang and Jane Austen are strikingly similar when it comes to value orientations in romances. Besides, the classic environmental description by Balzac, a great French novelist, has also struck a chord with Wang, which can be clearly seen from her depiction of the external scenes, especially the urban backgrounds.In the middle and late1980s, Chinese literature saw a boom in introducing, translating and learning from western modernist literary theories and works. Accordingly, Wang’s works created in this period have well absorbed these theories. For example, Baotown, her representative work featuring a "root-seeking" theme, has organically imitated One Hundred Years of Solitude, a magical realist novel by Garcia Marquez, while the launch of her Love in a Small Town, Love on a Barren Mountain and Brocade Valley are closely associated with prevalence of Freud’s Libido Theory. The western modernist literary theory of "turning inward" has also exerted certain influence on her by urging her to focus more on the figures’" Spiritual World ", with A Story about My Uncle being another masterpiece marking her transformation in narration:the narrative style and pattern has been freshly endowed with meta-narrative traits of western novels.In the "Spiritual World" that she is trying to create, a large portion of paragraphs has been devoted to the description about the history of female mind, because as a female author, she tends to interpret the unique and profound female individual in her own way. On the one hand, she admits that women are oppressed under male-centralism, for which a lot of female tragic characters can be found in her works; on the other hand, she denies homo-sexual love and such notions as "body writing" in radical feminism and writes in a gentle and compromised way instead. The success of her novels, such as The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Fu Ping proves that she is so good at depicting various women with disparate personalities and destinies at different periods of time, which is a writing integrated feminism and new historicism. Her expressive style has also changed again to match the female’s world she creates:"Parler Femme"(feminine language), which is more feminine and seemingly aimless, was adopted, just fitting Irigaray’s theory. Hence her acceptation of western feminist theories is more clearly shown.Wang has developed a unique theory on literary creation during years of practice. Lectures on Literature by Nabokov has exerted significant impact on her Spiritual World, a collection of literary essays. Indeed, the Russian novelist’s remark "Brilliant novelists have created divine worlds" has also encouraged the formation of Wang’s principle of creation. Furthermore, her Deluxe Family, a summary on Agatha Christie’s novels, is a proof that she is more assertive in how to construct the "Spiritual World":She derived her own theories from such aspects as novel themes, character types, and narrative approaches. The long-time nourishment of foreign literature and foreign literary theories has played an indispensible role in all of her achievements.No author can get rid of influence from his or her surroundings, and An-yi Wang is no exception. Wang’s literary creation, which has lasted for so many years, reflects the integration of contemporary Chinese literature and foreign literature. As an integral part of literary tradition and environment, foreign literary resources have broadened her vision and opened her mind for writing, the era has provided her with a lot to write about, and the development of literature itself has brought diversified expressive approaches. To some extent, An-yi Wang’s literary career is a successful example of accepting influence from foreign literature and implementing creative transformation. Only by studying such a writer and his/her works can we build a solid foundation for learning about the internal relationship between contemporary Chinese literature and foreign literature since the1980s, breaking the shackle of simple study on national literature and understanding the development of contemporary Chinese literature in a wider perspective. |
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