Pearls Of The Bottom

With the deepening of China’s reforms and opening up to the outside world, more and more literary representing subjects appears, such as reform literature, peasant labor literature; these literatures reflect the characteristics and social issues of today’s China. However, one literature phenomenon, namely the novels about left-behind children(LBC), is overlooked by many scholars.Although the left-behind children issue is a thorny social problem in present-day China; and attracts more and more attentions, the children literature seems ignore this topic; very few works about left-behind children has been found in the children literature, especially novels. Therefore, it is difficult to evaluate the importance and effect of novels about LBC in the contemporary children literature. This thesis tries to study the LBC novel writing over the last ten years from the perspectives of child; it uses the different approaches, say the childhood history, thematology, psychology analysis, and comparative study, to reproduce the image of left-behind children.This thesis consists4parts counting off the introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, the studies of LBC novels are reviewed, while in the conclusion, the value and significance of LBC novels are discussed. Part1defines the concept of LBC novel based on the status of writing and study of LBC novels. It points out that social criticism and aesthetic criticism constitute the main aspects of literary criticism. Part2and part3discuss the images of LBC character relations, and children’s mentality from the social aspect. In part2, a specific classification of images of LBC is carried out; it mainly divides into three regimes, namely the lonely watcher, children with distorted childhood, and struggler of fate. In every specific regime, the nuance of boy and girl is observed; thus that the inherent images of LBC are vividly presented. Part3discusses complex cause of images of LBC from three main aspects, i.e., the mental and physiological impacts of LBC due to the lack of parental care-taking, the affection compensation with ignorance of parental love, and LBC’S imagination and experience of cities. Part4studies the images of LBC from the aesthetic aspect; it investigates the construction of aesthetic distance, aesthetic viewing angle and aesthetic objective to the image of LBC.This thesis analyzes the image of LBC, and discusses the value in thinking of LBC novel writing to the development of contemporary children literature and the affecting factors. Therefore, it is valuable to the study of LBC novels.