I Want A Home:a Study On Urban Home Space In Contemporary China Television Drama Series

Home, a place that is irreplaceable in every Chinese's mind. As the process of urbanization and urban modernization are continuing after the1990's in China, more and more cities constantly emerge in mainland China, with on-going extended geographical land scale and population size, huge cultural transformation, and tremendous changes happening in the way of life in city. These changes of city environment put transforms of city homes and families in motion. The population size of families in city continuously reduces while the structures of families are dynamically diversified. Other more changes also show their traces in urban homes, such as the time of urban home becoming "visible", the space of urban home multidimensional, and life in home consumable and complicated. The image of urban home is showing a brand new presentation.Modernity, fashion, openness, heterogeneousness, multidimensionality are all key words in city life, and these features of city life are attracting more and more young people, whether from countryside or city, choose to stay and live in city nowadays. Some of them strive and struggle for a home in the city while others explore and pursuit for a better life in their houses. They do everything to make one same dream come true:that is a sweat home where happiness lived in. What are the images of urban home in their dreams? How do their urban family lives look like? What are the relationships of such imagination and reality? In order to answer these questions, besides traditional sociological researches, we can also choose a new study perspective by using television drama series as materials, because television drama, with characteristics such as commerciality, marketability, standardization, and duplicability, has become a main resource of culture consumption for people in city. In order to pursuit maximized commercial interest, television drama must and have to focus on people's daily lives in city and present them as they are/were, or they will lose their audience in an irreparable way.This thesis is written on the background of the process of urbanization, urban consumer culture, and their influences to the urban families after1990's in mainland China, with the purpose of exploring the imaginable pictures of urban homes and their agreement and disagreement with actual family daily lives in the spaces of urban homes of young people, composed of most part of the generation after1980's and some part of the generation after1970's, who are now living in city (as opposed to countryside), with contemporary urban-themed television drama series as materials, study methods from sociology, culturology, and narratology, and theoretical guidance from modern and post-modern space theories. Moreover, this thesis is also trying to discuss the problems in these television drama series on the matter of urban-home-space-image construction, with a further expectation of being constructive for a better development of Chinese urban-themed television drama series.