Zhou Tongbin’s Prose Analysis

As a member of the1990s Nanyang Writers Group, Zhou Tongbin’s research value not only confined to the literary achievements as a group of writers but played a larger role as well. Engaging in prose writing for nearly30years, Zhou inherits the Nanyang writer’s rustic, simple, honest, and creative style that is focused on attachment to the native world. His outstanding performance has really opened up a new world of Nanyang prose.Zhou Tongbin’s prose writing experiences span love songs-elegy-local history books, three stages of development. From praising hometown ode to being concerned about the fate of farmers, and considering the rational analysis of the value of individual life, his transformation and sign of maturity is the birth of his prose Huang Tian Hou To. Recalling the cultural history of China, there is very little spoken language from the ordinary population in literary works. Farmers are more the "silent majority.’ Represented by the prose Huang Tian Hou To, the author’s native prose series derives from the real life of the rural areas, to reflect the profound changes in rural areas, concerns farmers living circumstances, and left a true voice for our times. Huang Tian Hou To is a master of this works. Reflecting on its style, the work is beyond the prose tradition:an innovative oral record. Reflecting in the subject matter, the work is rich in thick, multi-angle, and documentary reflection of the social life of the village. As it turns its focus onto farmers survival status and psychological situation on this transition period in perspective, his work shows the rural poverty and ignorance confrontation with the modern sense of the conflict, as well as the conservative straight soil and the reform-minded conflict, and pay attention on the buds of the developments and the local new scenes, it has both inherited and transcendence.Modern prose theoretical studies shows that the prose is a trinity style of thinking, history, poetry. To analyze the connotation of Zhou Tongbin’s native prose, we must begin from three fronts:composing poetry, capturing realism, and recording history. Nanyang Basin gives its local writers the awareness, honest personality, culture, and philosophy of its farmers. Then going to local rye fields to find a spiritual home became Zhou Tongbin’s prose writing driving force. His work is to complete the course of a "spirit of the return" to the native. As prose writers who accept the education of modern civilization, have a rational, independent speculative personality, they always adhere to the "must be true for the text" concept. When seeing the countryside and cultural backwardness of the old environment contrary to the development of modern civilization, they have a deep drive to reflect on the agricultural civilization, conscious, attitude, and thinking on this history. In this sense, Huang Tian Hou To is not only a native prose but also a "farmer’s son"-more like a documentary history book. It presents the rural image of an era.Huang Tian Hou To is the representative work that epitomizes the Zhou Tongbin’s unique artistic style and pursuits. His stylistic transcendence, geographical choice of theme, flexible narrative form and the plain and simple language style all combine to create one masterpiece.