On The Shi Tuo Fiction

Shi Tuo was one of the famous writers during 1930s and 1940s in China. Shi Tuo experienced two important spatial transfers, i.e., from Qi county, Henan to the bustling cities, which had considerable influence on his writing. Cities provided him with a place to live, while his life in the rural county during his childhood enriched him with profound materials for writing. Although Shi Tuo called himself"bumpkin", he was no longer a"bumpkin"in the traditional sense after edification and baptism of the modern civilization. Therefore, he had to linger in between the countryside and cities, mentally suffering dual ordeal and exile, tasting dual loss and pain. The conflicts between countryside and cities, traditional and modern world, led to conflicts between his body and mind, as well as his living and writing.In the light of the aforementioned, this paper attempts to present the characteristics of the time of both countryside and cities, to portray people's life in them, to dig out the unchangeable theme of Shi Tuo's works---people's hard and painful living condition, and the ubiquitous tragic life of human beings, to seek for an explanation for Shi Tuo's writing motive, and to sort out his attitudes towards countryside and cities, as well as his thinking over how to establish a reasonable human nature, thus to restore Shi Tuo's status in the history of Chinese Literature.Besides introduction and conclusion, this paper is composed of two parts. The first part studies Shi Tuo's novels about country life. This part mainly presents the rural characteristics: stagnant and unchangeable villages, indifferent and numb villagers. Then, it analyzes the reason for those characteristics and studies Shi Tuo's sympathetic feelings shown in those works and his thinking over rebuilding a reasonable human nature. The second part focuses on Shi Tuo's novels about city life. It firstly presents the characteristics of cities under the impact of modern Western thoughts, then seeks to explain why the writer chose to write in this way and studies the city concept revealed in the writer's works. This paper is an elucidatory supplement to the study on Shi Tuo. Hopefully it can further promote the study.