Zhao Mei's Novel Creations In The Western Literary(Artistic) Background

Zhao Mei is a representative feminist writer in China. She has written and published 17 novels,6 corpuses of novelettes and short stories,18 corpuses of essays and 2 serial transcripts, amounting to over 6 millions words. In fact, her unique writing techniques not only win her a number of readers, but also give her novels and short stories a unique style. For this, she has gained a position in the present literary arena.The present researches are mainly interested in her novels, essays and her writing as a whole. The focus is on interpreting her specific work from the feminist angle. However, the study of her writing as a whole is scarce. Zhao Mei has a European complex and her writing is conspicuously stamped with the literary characteristics of the Western world, which is acknowledged by Zhao Mei herself. This was touched upon by some researchers before, but their discussion is by no means systematic and profound. In this thesis, the method of impact-acceptance is adopted. By studying the emitter, recipient and transmitter in order, we would be able to find the origin of her main ideas, discover the media between her writing and the western literature and art, and therefore gain a better understanding of her works.It is easy to find the western elements in Zhao Mei's works, which fall into two major categories:literature and motion picture arts. Those emitters include Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf and William C. Faulkner who Zhao Mei has a spiritual affinity with, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Claude Simon, Milan Kundera whom she admires rationally and movie director Jean Luc Godard. Zhao formed her own ideas about novel writing on the basis of learning from the West and inheriting the tradition. "Special attention should be paid to the form of a work and the pursuit of form can yield unexpected results"; "As for literary works (novels in particular), thought takes priority"; "The sole purpose of (novel) writing is to balance something unbalanced in life". Both external factors such as urban environment, family members and school education and internal elements including Zhao's own reading experience and traveling in the west contribute to how she is affected by Western literature and arts.