Youth Narratives In The 1980s’ Novelettes Abstract

“Youth” is one of the key words when it comes to the 20 th century history of Chinese literature. Centennial Chinese literature history can be regarded as centennial history of youth development viewed from some point. The thesis narrowed the period of time, focusing on the 1980 s when drastic changes took place in politics, culture and social structure. Literature at that disruptive time has also undergone dramatic changes, going through flexuous and complex historical evolution in terms of ideological emancipation, economic prosperity and consumer culture. The diversified literature ideological trend, literary phenomenon and literary works got a lot of attention in the history of Chinese literature.Relatively speaking, novelettes best represent the new period literary achievement in terms of literary style with quantity of writings, relatively stable quality, depth and breadth of novels, agility of short stories, abundant social and literary information content, all of which endows novelettes with readability and evokes echoes and repercussions from their readers and critics. Novelettes have been less affected by social transformation and mass culture with strong support from large-scale literary periodicals with regard to their production and distribution. With its style superiority and relatively stable authors and readers, novelettes find rescue in desperate circumstances in the consumption age and make the maintenance of past achievements possible so as to defend literariness rather than follow the fashion. Regardless of the content, the literariness of novelettes never wavered based on the comprehension of basic literary values and persistence of faith in literature. Therefore, novelettes became dominant forces for all sorts of literary styles and portrayed the pure literary quality of themselves. The depiction of youth culture in this particular period of time naturally displayed distinct characteristics by means of this specific literary style. It is precisely because of its remarkable importance, novelettes on the subject of youth are regarded as the object of study in this thesis.The thesis includes four parts, Introduction, three chapters for the main Body, Conclusion and Bibliography. The main focus of this thesis is on intensive reading of representative “youth narratives” of novelettes in the particular transformation period and multicultural context of the 1980 s to probe into the ingratiation, alienation and paradox among “youth narratives” novels, specific historical context and literary field; the entanglement between contemporary literature and the state ideology; the generation, change and development of subjective identity and mentality of contemporary writers; and the current crisis and future trend of “youth narratives” in contemporary novels.Basic contents of the thesis are as follows: Chapter One illustrates “youth narratives” primarily in novel texts of “literature of the educated youth” in the 1980s; Chapter Two presents “youth narratives” in the 1980 s “roots” literature and vanguard novels; Chapter Three depicts the narrative turn of “youth narratives” in this period of time of “liberation generation” and “the generation after 45s” represented by Wang Meng and Wang Anyi and the individual memory on youthful days of the “new generation” represented by writers(including Yu Hua and Su Tong) who were born in the 1960 s and also discusses the resulting transformation of aesthetic manners and evolution of subjective cultural mentality of writers.The thesis mainly emphasizes on: displaying historical changes of constant quantity and variable quantity of “youth narratives” in the 1980 s in order to grasp the dynamic fabric, progressive and congregated inner paradoxical movement and law of contradiction; probing into the correlation, experience and lessons of “youth narratives” in novels with complex historical context, literary field, ideology, ideological resources in the new period; discussing the subjective spirit and attitude of contemporary writers behind the novels and implicit changes of juche idea in narration and exploring the internal relation between thoughts and destiny with cultural positions among contemporary writers of different generations via analyzing “youth narratives” in novels.The thesis attempts to figure out the constantly changing rules and causes of contemporary Chinese writers in terms of their mentality from all sorts of presentations so as to look for possible chances to carry out dialogues among them through discrepant depictions in “youth novels” by contemporary writers of different generations and through comparative study of different ways of narration for a same story. These discrepancies reflect some kind of choices of contemporary writers on the one hand, whereas on the other hand they interrelate the social reality since the 20 th century and psychological changes of intellectuals which manifest in most cases the cultural characters and spiritual ethos of writers. Therefore, reveal problems from the aspect of spiritual structure, self-awareness and psychology of creation, explores the generation, change and development of contemporary writers based on the revelation; discusses the alternation of identity consciousness and cultural mentality of contemporary writers; expounds transition and differentiation on thoughts in the contemporary transforming society, all of which is to form a research thought---cultural criticism. Focusing on the evolution of enlightenment thoughts in the 1980 s of modern intellectuals and the views on ingratiation, query, alienation and deconstruction of contemporary writers to enlightenment thoughts in order to make a survey of changes in identity and alternation of cultural mentality of contemporary Chinese writers and searching for ideological factors behind the problems.After reviewing the “youth novels” in the 1980 s, we realize the continuous query of “youth” of contemporary writers gradually progressed in accordance with the route:political ideology--- lack of human nature--- excavation of cultural “roots”---possibilities of human existence, which proceed from the exterior to the interior spiritual world and form in the query the identity “torchbearer--- revolutionary---torchbearer--- marginal man” in terms of identity consciousness and drive changes in a series of courses: passion--- rebellion--- search--- growth with regard to cultural mentality. The thesis verifies the findings from case analysis of Gao Xiaosheng, Zhang Chengzhi, Wang Anyi, Wang Xiaobo, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Tie Ning and attempts to draw a general pattern and a rough outline of spiritual development of contemporary intellectuals.