.90 Novels Consumerism Turned

In 1990s Chinese literature was seeing an effective shift, which has been in agreement in academic circles. Novel is always the main type of letters, which has played a great part in the literature history since the new period. Furthermore approaches to study novels in 90s from different angles, emerge in endlessly, even having made completely different value judgments. Nevertheless, what appeals to me about 90s'fictions are their curiosity, full of changes and disputes. So I present another new perspective to aim at"the consumerism turn"of novels in 1990s from a new cultural background, that is,"the consumerism culture context".In 1990s, China was stepping towards the consumer society, with the consumer culture gradually rising to the dominant tide of cultures. In my paper, distinguishing from"consumer culture"with rather broad meanings, I use the word"consumerism"through the whole paper in order to emphasize that"consumer culture"possesses two features: as cultural hegemony and a kind of life style. Consequently, consumerism refers to the consumerism culture in a broad sense, and also to the consumerism life-style in a narrow sense. The two features are dependant on each other and promote one another, just being an interactive state of balance. What's more, it is the expansion of consumerism that contributed to the consumerism culture context, thereby giving birth to the consumerism turn of novels."The consumerism turn"is the general theoretical premise and starting point, which is also a summation including many gradual changes in writing style. The consumerism turn of novels, is to say that writers'working consciousness, and subjects, literary device, artistry in works, are all marked with consumerism, hence showing many obvious distinctions, compared with the times in which no consumerism appear, or consumerism is not strong enough to result in the consumerism culture context. My paper is mainly to study long novels and novellas from 1990-1999, with six writers as representatives, namely Chen Ran, Lin Bai, Wang Anyi, Chi Li, He Dun and Han Dong, published on the three Chinese literary magazines,"Fiction Monthly Magazine","Harvest"and"Flower City". After reading...