Small-town World And Women's Writing

Small town, as a unique implication of the geographic space, plays an important role in the process of China's social development. Located between city and rural area, it is a collision field for old and new, a combination for modern civilization and traditional culture. It also possesses the characteristics of all-embracing diversity, independent and rich aesthetic significance and research value. However, this urban-rural landscape has failed to attract enough attention all along, and the position and nature of the text describing small town people and events are often ambiguous in an awkward way:either is included into local literature or urban literature. Under the broad background of social development, the uniqueness of small town society and small town literature has been covered up, the complexity dispelled and the richness ignored. Separating the small town from its urban-rural dual structure, exploring its deeper spatial, historical and cultural connotation, exposing its self-contained style in text narration—all these will be helpful in tracing origins and organizing ideas, and in highlighting the trapped and covered value subject so that the research can be more objective and realer. Small town literature is in large quantity, profound in intrinsic meaning and involves a wide range of writers. Although the small town literature has been in existence for over a century since the New Literature yet is repeatedly ignored, an in-depth study of it is bound to expand new research paradigm and to dig out deeper cultural psychology and inner aesthetic pursuit.Small town is not only a concept in geographical, social and cultural areas, but also a distinctive literary concept. From the perspectives of humanities and geography, society and history, custom and culture and so on, and combined with the texts, this paper explores small town images in different time and place, cultural horizon and literature writing to analyze the town's multiplicity, complexity and profundity in a detailed way. The paper argues that on one hand the largeness of small town lies in the fact that it occupies a broad urban-rural area, that it possesses infinite containment and that it integrates old and new, continuity and change, modern and traditional, penetrating into the fabric of Chinese culture in its own style. On the other hand, the smallness of small town consists in that writers condense yet fully represent the changing history and the rising and falling fate of characters by using the narrow space on the text.Small towns in literature are colorful and fascinating, to which female writers have contributed a lot. This paper organizes clues of writing small town and cultural choices of those female writers to reveal the long history and spiritual background of female writers in creating small town stories. On this basis, the study conducts an overall exploration and grasp by means of close reading. From the content level, female writers build small towns relying on their own growth experience and regional knowledge, utilizing all kinds of cultural resources and life inspiration. They weave stories, structure plots and outline scenes from a unique perspective, typifying their literary works in a poetic way. From the spiritual level, "small town girls" have shown an intense feeling of homesickness in their narration, which indeed combines multiple motivations of society and individual, reflects a deep national cultural mentality, and partly reveals some kind of conformity with or anxiety about the small town. Meanwhile, a sentimental emotion for the passing time is spread out.In their literature writing of small town world, female writers have not only achieved great success, demonstrated remarkable talent, but also developed a unique writing style and narrative mode:poetic bulk structure, naive childhood perspective and beautiful images have all highlighted the delicacy and flexibility of women. However, this has just functioned as a double-edged sword, which both constitutes a colorful, thought-provoking literary landscape and causes a kind of passivation and stagnation because of female writers' narrow horizon and overflowing emotion.