Mei Niang Novel Review

Mei Niang, born with the name of Sun Jiarui in Changchun, Jilin Province, was a dominant woman writer in the Japanese-occupied territory in Northern and North-east China during the period of the war of Resistance against Japan. She is also, in contemporary literary circles, one of the very few ones who's still living and in good health among those so-called "enemy-occupied area" writers. Her life is full of frustrations. Her mother died when she was a little child, and so did her father at her early youth. Being a young mother, she lost her daughter, and at her old age, her son passed away. In the Cultural Revolution (1966-19760), she was labeled "traitor to China", and "the Right Wing", thus being eclipsed in the literary world. After the Cultural Revolution, she was brought back to the arena of literature as researches on the "Enemy-occupied Area" Literature began to make progress. In 1997, her works was included in the Contemporary Literature Series compiled by Qian Liqun, and ever since then, Mei Niang began to attract the attention from the literary world. Mei Niang's literary creation falls into two periods: one before the founding of the People's Republic of China, and the other after that. Most of her novels were accomplished before the founding of the People's Republic of China, and were published in the Japanese-occupied area. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, she writes mainly prose and some informal essays.Cherishing a feeling of great reverence for Mei Niang, the author of this thesis, by focusing on her novels in 1930's and 1940's, tries to make an exploratory research into the characters in her novels, her emotions and the aesthetic qualities in her writings, which well betray Mei Niang's world of literature, with the background of Women's Literature and "Enemy-occupied Area" Literature.The first part of this thesis probes into the characters for whom Mei Niang cares a lot in her novels by revealing the characteristics and connotations of them. In her vivid depiction of the female, male and children, Mei Niang cast a unique perception towards women's fate and her incisive criticism to male-dominant culture.The second part explores Mei Niang's emotional world in her literary creation and explains why her works merely reproduced the reality instead of attacking the authorities. The reason for this is that under the political circumstances then prevailing in the "enemy-occupied area", no writers at that time was able to express oneself freely, and there was very narrow space for writers to move forward in their literary creation. Mei Niang's careful observation of ordinary people's daily lives and her spontaneous revelation of her deep love for her homeland in her works bespoke vividly people's fear of the war and their worries about survival. The third part dwells on the aesthetic qualities in Mei Niang's novels with an attempt to position her works in the literary arena. This part also elaborates the impact and influence upon her literary creation. With the regional culture characteristics featuring that of the North-east China as the core of her writing, Mei Niang carried forward the essence of the May Fourth Movement, a new culture movement. Because of this, Mei Niang incorporated precisely in her writing some vigor and power, together with delicacy, exquisiteness and compassion, which later formulates her unique style of writing.