Shen Xiangxi Novels In The Form Of Significance

The4th decade of20th century in China was full filled with thoughts collision. It went on just after the May4th Movement of1919, and people of that era were under the pressure of rescuing their nation. As a person who was keeping pace with the time, Shen Congwen actually always said that he was a countryman. I am curious about how the era and the unique way of his growth affected his ideology. With that wondering, this paper pick the time forms and the space forms of Shen’s Xiangxi fictions as research objects to discuss how Shen, as claiming to be a liberal, kept his writing ideal and analysis his being conscious of modernness and simultaneously anti-modern writings. I study the forms in two different ways:on one hand, I study the characteristics of consumption and the combination of virtuality and reality of time and space; on the other hand, I study the writing methods of Shen’s writing, which contains reminiscent narrative, typical spatial narrative and anti-modern narrative. Shen made his cultural point, which was anti-modern, after hovering between tradition and modernness. This paper is organized as below:the first chapter introduce the forms of time and space that Shen chose; the second chapter abstract Shen’s time forms into expendable time and reminiscent time, and get the conclusion that Shen was an anti-modern writer through analysis of time forms; the third chapter acquire what Shen’s pursuit of typical narrative is through the perspective of the combination of virtuality and reality of space, and the perspective of the aspect of narrative; the last chapter discuss the significance of Shen’s anti-modern characteristic in the literary history.The innovation of this paper is, this is the first time that Shen Congwen’s works are studied through the perspectives of forms of time and space and writing techniques. This paper study Shen’s cultural choice between tradition and modernness, considering the background of era and culture, one conclusion is obtained:Shen Congwen is an anti-modern writer with consciousness of modernness.