Wuhan In Literature

For a long time, the city has been the object to be described or imagined in literature. The city writing is an imaginative literary practice with the city as the object. Wuhan, as a typical city in inland China, often appears in the literature. In particular, since the mid1980s, the Hubei city novels with Wuhan as the expressing object have taken an important part in Chinese city literature. Based on the regional cultural feature of Wuhan and sticking closely to the context of the transformation period, this paper attempts to construct the image of Wuhan in the literature of new era from three respects, i.e."secular city","classical city" and "lapsing city". Then, it discusses the reasons why the writers of Wuhan undertake various patterns of imaginative writing on this city.In the literature, Wuhan is a secular city. The common customer and the heterogeneousness are the most noticeable and also ignorable cultural feature. The so-called common customer is displayed by the fact that in face of the strong and prevailing of the culture of urban petty bourgeois, the elite culture is fragile and vulnerable; and the so-called heterogeneousness on the one hand displays the complicated customer of a place where all kinds of people live and on the other hand indicates the ambiguous citizen’s characteristics and urban feeling experience.In the literature, Wuhan is a classical city. The writers of Wuhan become more and more initiative and conscious in writing the history of Wuhan and placing the theme in the historical writing. With an eye to the past of the old Wuhan and Hankou, they admire recall the glorious dream of "eastern Chicago" and then demonstrate the hardship it suffered in the evolution and pain in the cracked development.In the literature, Wuhan is an elapsing city. With the forthcoming of consumption age, this modernized metropolis often appears as an unknown and homogeneous city in the works of the writers in the new era, who realize the characteristic culture of this city is gradually fading away. The materialized city brings people spiritual loneliness more than anything else.The city and the writer are mutually interactive. The writer is the creator of the city image and object created by the city as well. The dual identity makes their imaginations different in some parts while identical in other parts. With Chi Li as the representative, the writers including He Zuohuan, Peng Jianxi and other inland writers show a certain approving attitude in describing the city of Wuhan; in the meantime, the writers including Fang Fang, Liu Jiming and Zhang Zhihao stick to their stand of "elite narration" due to their common intellectual background or their initiative of looking at things in the intellectual perspective,.