| In the 1990s, China's politics, economy and culture have entered a period of comprehensive transformation. It is a profound and widespread social reform, which has brought about not only the restructuring of social systems, but also, at the same time, the change of the real world and the deep influence on people's understanding of their own surviving status, their conception about values and some psychological levels like the aesthetic awareness of the spiritual world.With the establishment and gradual improvement of the market economy system, urban awareness with commodity awareness at the core has been constantly strengthened in all areas of life. All this has changed people's accustomed ways of living and established values. Values are closely associated with the spirit of the age and change with the advancement of the age. They have a strong sense of the times. Different conditions of the times develop different cultural characteristics. Social aesthetic trends with a strong cultural significance and aesthetic consciousness resulted from them will also vary, change with the times, and enrich, perfect their connotation. When the society is in the era of rapid changes, it is inevitable for the old values to transform and reconstruct into the new ones. And the change is often reflected in the mirror of literature. Literature, as a vane of social values and spirit, is closely related to social and cultural environment, especially the aesthetic trends and awareness. Just because of that, no more cultural forms than literature can timely and accurately characterize social psychological status and people's views, thoughts, feelings and reflections.The 1990s urban novels have just emerged in this specific environment of transformation of times and values. They bring new urban material landscapes, new social levels and new variety of people into aesthetic vision, and reveal the differences between urban lifestyles and rural lifestyles which have brought about the change of values and aesthetic consciousness. The novels also reveal all the confusion and perplexity brought by urban life, and then reflect the conflicts between old and new, traditional and modern values and aesthetic perceptions. Therefore, to explore the value structuring of the 1990s urban novels from aesthetic perspectives under metropolitan cultural context is of great significance to enter the spiritual world of city people, explain the surviving state in the city, and thereby touch the soul of the city.After the overall observation and reflection over the 90s urban surviving state, we find that in the social transformation period, urban culture formed with the gradual progress of urbanization shows new characters and features significantly different from traditional rural culture. Through the analysis of the characteristics of urban culture, the study further reveals the truth of the 90s urban aesthetic consciousness that what the 90s urban culture advocates is in fact a secular aesthetic culture with lessened lofty spirit and fully converted to folk culture.Since the 1990s, the start-up and prosperity of market economy have led to the rise and growth of civic society so as to provide a broad creating space for urban novels. Meanwhile, metropolitan cultural context under the conditions of market economy has overthrown the dominance of both the political mainstream discourse and the elite-enlightened discourse. And based on that, a genuine multi-cultural pattern came into being. In this context of a wide range of urban culture, urban novels also freed themselves from the discipline of the political and elite awareness and back to the position of civil narration where more and more writers began to stay to write about civil secular life and gradually alienated in the values from the mainstream aesthetic consciousness form and converged toward civil aesthetic consciousness and cultural values. As a result, urban novels produced under such a metropolitan cultural context were rooted in the soil of urban civil society and fully presented this secular nature of aesthetic consciousness so that civil narration has become an aesthetic paradigm of urban novels. Only in the civil narrative discourse does daily life break loose from the grand themes on history, society and revolution, become an independent aesthetic presentation, and obtain self-sufficient value and significance. At the age of renewal, people"begin to ponder their own self-worth and get aware that it is non-sacred, non-noble or even mediocre. Perhaps this is a fundamental contradiction of the 'modernity': the progress or liberation obtained at the expense of lofty, even tragic spirit and'dripping blood'has finally become the affirmation and guarantee of peaceful and trivial daily life of the civilians."The 1990s urban culture eliminated the regulation of political ideology and the coverage of the enlightenment mainstream and endeavored to revive the most primitive daily state in life such as handling firewood, rice, oil, salt, etc, dealing with trifles of livelihood, falling in love and getting married, seeking fame and wealth. Just this kind of day-to-day patterns constitute the basic fulcrum of human survival and eternal content of civilian life. The 1990s urban novels with clear attitudes uncovered the civil secular daily life to fully display its primitiveness, spontaneousness and constancy so as to restructure a new philosophy of life through the approach and restore of civil daily life. Human life is so basic as to be irresistible and unavoidable. In a sense, it doesn't need modifying or saving. At the same time, from the interpretation and identification of the value of daily life, we have also learned that the tide of history is constantly changing and difficult to grasp, but daily life is eternal, and it has expressed the truth of the mortals in an irresistible force. The 1990s writers of urban novels returned to ordinary civilians and with accepted civil aesthetic awareness started to approach to their daily life to portray fresh, full and rich characters, to explore and display the beauty of the peaceful and trivial daily life.Under the metropolitan cultural context, the construction of the civil secular aesthetic value of the 1990s urban novels is also presented in the restatement on desire. It is well-known that in a fairly long period of history, the traditional virtues of"valuing generous deeds over material gains"advocated by the traditional rural civilization, blocked to a great extent the expansion and overrun of the material desires of the civilians, representing in literature the repression of rational discourse over material desires. Since the 1990s, along with the development of market economy and the collapse of the traditional value system, the civil material desires have acquired the feasibility of practice and the legitimacy of existence in the loose and free social and cultural context."People believe the importance of money, revive and manufacture a variety of myths of money worship. They don't hesitate to stand by the personal rights of secular happiness to frankly accept the happy life stacked with money."Urban novels keenly felt the aesthetic value conversion of this period of social transition and made a new aesthetic understanding and interpretation about the secular concept of city people. In the materialized city, the commercial context has become the narrative background of many novels. Urban novels have interpreted the importance of money in the secular life and sought reasonability for the desire-oriented chase of money so as to establish the secular value system focused on money. For example, in the works of writers, like He Dun, Qiu Hua-dong, etc., who were born in the 1960s and 1970s, what was originally viewed as mean cash values has now entered the literary discourse and even become a sound value vane. Writings about desires in the 1990s urban novels are not only reflected in the description about material desires but also in the favor and inclination toward presentation of the instinct desires of sex which many writers of emotional novels turn to simultaneously to portray. In fact, this phenomenon of human nature presentation has inherent logic relations with the presentation of material desires, that is, when people's orientation of value incline from matter to spirit, it is bound to lead to the exclusion of rational sense in the emotional field and the zeal for the enjoyment of senses. Thus, sexual desire descriptions in the narrative texts of urban novels have attracted people's attention and become the focus of concern of both writers and readers. Showed in the straightforward and exposed descriptions of sexual desires in the novel is a typical secular aesthetic expression.Maybe the secular aesthetic value system structured by urban novels, by itself, is a kind of a paradox—it has both the simple and vigorous spirit and the carefree character. On the other hand, it also hold, because of its cultural features of"assembling the worst elements of society", the dregs and the dirt of hedonism, sexualism, profit-chasing doctrines, showing a complex cultural pattern of mixing beauty and ugliness, good and evil, flaw and fine jade. That requires that the writers, while advocating the civil spirit, should upgrade their modern aesthetic taste and be away from the state of being vulgar in literary creation, and truly present the current value worship in the deep hearts of civilians. Thus the topic of saving spirit is naturally brought about. In the creation of the 1990s urban novels, despite the civilian cultural awareness presenting the secular culture, the individual cultural awareness inspecting self-desires, or even the urban cultural awareness revealing vagrancy, they all reflect various aspects of city life, display human landscapes in the city, present urban culture, outline complex forms of life in the city and man's thinking about their own living state. Through the analysis on urban cultural aesthetic consciousness and the structuring of the aesthetic value of the 1990s urban novels under that context, we can see that the vitality of urban novels is not less than that of local novels. We can not only find from the variety of the creation of urban novels the shifts of aesthetic objects, the expansion of aesthetic consciousness, but also identify clearly the direction of literary creation from the perspective of culture. In view of that, the creation of the 1990s urban novels is of unique practical significance. The 1990s urban novels have presented a new literary landscape which is worthwhile for us to study and explore.
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