Modern Narrative Beyond History: Modern Historical Novel In China

Since Lu Xun published his first historical novel Bu Zhou Shan in the 1920s, modern historical novel has experienced prosperous period in 1930s and stable developing period in 1940s.However,as a kind of literature phenomena which can not be neglected in literature history,attention to and study on modern historical novel always stays in the deserted status.Theoretical study tends to focus on "what modern historical novel narrates",while ignores "how modern historical novel narrates". Therefore,this paper tries to study modern historical novel systematically in the perspective of narratology and probes into new nature in narrative of modern historical novel by referring to traditional historical novel.This paper is divided into three chapters.Chapter 1 discusses on the narrative time of modern historical novel.The author describes narrative features of modern historical novel in the light of presence nature and staggered nature of narrative time.During the creative procedure of novel,writers firstly lay keynote for present tense of the whole novel.Secondly,during the narrative process,writers realize present tense of the whole novel by invisible or visible methods.Besides,writers break the linear narrative of novel by using flashback, taking advantage of illogical and causality characteristics of psychology and dialogues divide time into two parts-past and present.In the round-trip of time,the author expresses ideas of heroes in their novels and their own value judgment.Chapter 2 researches on how writers of modern historical novel realize narrative breakthrough under the premise of following the omniscient perspective of traditional historical novel.In modern historical novel,writers either express personal feeling with poetic language by combing themselves with narrators,or make fervent theoretical propaganda by entering the space of novel narrative to carry out functions instead of narrators,or make deep and rational analysis by staying behind with cold and objective attitude.Chapter 3 analyzes historic narrative concept of modern historical novel writers and new features resulting from those.Writers give full play to imaginary and fictitious functions of novels so as to get out of the control of shackles that traditional historical novel scrupulously follows historic tradition.In terms of material selection of historical novel,writers usually cut and select historic materials according to the requirements of topics.In terms of image modeling,modern historical novel completely breaks the expressing method of making historic heroes as myth as well as understands and interprets persons in history.In terms of expressing form,modern historical novel writers create different styles of works like absurd and sarcastic type, romantic and feeling expressing type,basic practical type,psychological analyzing type,poetic type and so on,which,extremely enriches expressing form of historical novel.