Study On Yan Geling's Novels From Trans-cultural Perspective

Yan Geling (1959-) is one of the most powerful and influential new immigrant writers in the North America Chinese literary arena at present. She has achieved the remarkable achievement in fiction creation and her works have repeatedly received the wide acclaim in the Chinese literary field home and abroad. Therefore, it is worth carrying on the case analysis and the in-depth research on her and her work. But so far there has been no doctoral dissertation which takes Yan Geling as the case study. This dissertation is based on the trans-cultural research perspective as well as a blending of approaches of comparative literature, cultural research and feminist criticism, in order to investigate the evolution and extension of Yan Geling's fiction in terms of creative themes, female images, narrative patterns and aesthetics consciousness. How the writer fuses the overseas life experience into her artistic creation is to be interpreted systematically and penetratingly via close reading of her works; the unique contributions of Yan Geling's fictions in the context of East-West cultural collision to the Chinese literature is to be revealed; the new "Chinese poetics discourse" of the overseas Chinese literature is to be explored.The first chapter of the dissertation provides a sketch of life and of the fiction writing of Yan Geling, together with an overview of the progress of domestic research and academic appraisal. The second chapter is an attempt at the discussion of the diversified subject materials of Yan Geling's fiction, and of the thematic evolution of her works; simultaneously unfolds her deep insights into human nature under the "extreme environment". The third chapter focuses on the evolution of the feminine life in her fiction, the cultural connotations and national implications of feminine images, and the impact of the writer's transformed cultural identity on the characterization of female characters. The fourth chapter concentrates on the artistic techniques like "double temporal-spatial narrative", narrator "I", history narrative and so on, offering an anatomy of the features of fictional narrative patterns and significance of the writer's complex identity.