In The 1940 S Novel Language Research

Language styles of novels in the1940s take different forms partly due to the unique wartime geopolitics, partly due to the diversified understanding of the literary heritage since the May Fourth Movement. Adopting the method of text analysis, this dissertation is devoted to revealing the heritage, new changes and turning points of the language of Chinese contemporary novels in1940s by integrating both historical knowledge and literary theories and encompassing both foreign and native influences.In Chapter1, we first clarify the definition of "Europeanization" in literary studies and briefly discuss its limitation. Then, centering around the language of Lu Ling’s novels, we proceed to explore in what sense the Europeanization of literary language can be deemed as a modern experience and how this modern experience is presented as "contradictory poetics."Chapter2focuses on the incorporation of European influences and describes how writers endeavor to interconnect the Europeanized language and conventional Chinese usages to conceive a more mature literary language. We first discuss in detail the use of personal pronouns in Shi Tuo’s novels and the historical connotation of the phenomenon; secondly we examine how the concept of time is characterized in contemporary literary language taking the usage of "le" in Xiao Hong’s novels as an example.The main theme of Chapter3is how to incorporate the influence of classical Chinese. The study investigates how Shen Congwen is confronted with a dilemma in his writing after forsaking classical Chinese and how he reconnects with the Chinese tradition again. The linguistic phenomenon examined is the characterization of reality and dream with complex sentences and null subject sentences.We deal with the more complex problems of the spoken language in Chapter4. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to the spoke language of intellectuals, taking Shi Tuo and Qian Zhongshu’s works as examples of the consistency of literary language while treating Bian Zhilin’s works as a rare style in contemporary literature. The second part discusses Zhou Libo’s change of language style to explore how to write in a non-native dialect, the difficulties of dialectal writing in the course of history and the main issues of dialectal writing per se.Through the discussion, the dissertation aims to present a more detailed picture of the novel language in1940s, and thus reveals the problems worthy of attention as well as further exploration.