Depiction Of City And Countryside Space In The Novels Of Sun Huifen

Sun Huifen, the writer, as a “farmer’s descendant” from Liaoning, relies on her unique life pilgrimage and experiences, applies the life events of travelling between city and countryside as the basic writing materials, and opens a window leading to the spiritual world of countryside among the connections and comparisons between city and countryside. From my reading experience, an extremely strong “sense of space” is exuberated from her works. “Space” is the most important concept in her novels to the extent that many novels from her are directly named by space, such as Going to the Pond, Xiema Village, Milky Way Bath, and House of Seventeen Years’ Old and so on. The space images and space graphics scattered among her works are even too numerous to introduce individually that we can see she has special affection to “space”. Time and space are two significant dimensions for a novel, “space” not only providing background for figures and events in the novel but also undertaking important narrative function. This paper takes the urban space and countryside space imagery as the entry point from the following works by Sun Huifen such as Going to the Pond, Jikuan’s Carriage, Immigrant Worker, and Two Women in Xiema Village, applies the literary space theories, culturology theories as well as sociology theories in order to analyze the construction and shaping of cities, the literary reduction of countryside map, and the looking relation between city and countryside in her works. This paper consists of four chapters: Chapter I is the introduction, mainly describing Sun Huifen’s creation status, research progress and literary theories related to this paper; Chapter II investigates the construction and shaping issues of cities in her works, including researches on the urban landscape and its concealing nature and suffocating sensation, on how countryside female’s body space is produced, as well as on the disciplinary effect of cities, also on the space anxiety and identity recognition issues encountered by outlanders in urban cities. Chapter III studies the literary reduction issue of countryside map in her works, centering on three issues of gradually to be opened countryside scenery, cultural practices in daily living space, and lookout and redemption in folk culture to develop discussions. The last chapter discusses the issue of looking relation between city and countryside with analysis being conducted from three perspectives such as “hierarchy” difference between city and countryside, coming into cities- “heterotopia” in cities as well as returning to countryside- “utopia” in countryside.