Echo And Development: Study On Long Yingtai's Parental Affection Essays

Long Yingtai is a female Chinese writer who was born in Taiwan and gradually became world-famous. From her very first book Wild Fire Collection which was published in the middle 1980s to the last one Big River Big Sea 1949 which come out in 2009, her works have got strong corresponding responses from the audience. People are used to see Long as a social critic and almost all those discussion was focused on those social criticism essays she wrote while actually there're three books among all her works concentrate on her family and parental affection and show a quite different soft Long Yingtai. The first one of these three books is Take Your Time, Dear Children. It was wrote when Long became a mother for the first time and she was full of joy to this new identity as well as the baby's education process. The next one came out more than ten years later called Dear Andrew, which were letters between middle-aged mom Long and her teenager son Andrew. Long was struggling to keep their parental intimacy at that time. The last one named Seeing Off published after Long became a professor in Hongkong and suffered her father's death. This time she thought much more about time and human's life. It'll easily create an illusion of Long's hard and tough character if these essays were neglected, so it's quite necessary to pay careful attention to this soft aspect in order to have a comprehensive understanding of Long Yingtai.This study focuses on those essays which take parental affection as main theme of Long Yingtai's works, and intends to discuss her essay topic, her expressive ways, and to explore the development of her writing as well as their literal value. The full text is composed of introduction, the main text and the conclusion and the main text is divided into five parts. The first part presents a general knowledge about Long Yingtai's life experience and her writing history to make sure the period and the fundamental mood she was in when she wrote the three books.The second chapter is based on the subject types and mainly discusses the mother role and the daughter role Long played in her essays separately.Then the next two chapters analyze the expression form of these essays from literary stylistics and language style dimension successively. Through the careful analysis of narrative person, literary form of letter, essay structure and the utility of image language and vigorous writing, it's an efficient way to find out why the mass audience always vibrate to Long's works.After this full recognition of the characteristic in Long's parental affection topic essays, the last part tries to build a comprehensive figure of Long Yingtai by connecting this soft side with the other hard side showed in those social critiques. Meanwhile, this chapter also makes a glance at the whole Taiwan modern essay's situation as the background of Long's writing and points out some limitation in the three books.The conclusion part summarizes Long Yingtai's writing about parental affection and reaches an inference that these three books is an echo over twenty years as well as a clear proof of Long's growing up from flat to deep-going.