On The Lane Culture In Wang Anyi’s Novels

The lane, as a unique Chinese cultural phenomenon, is an epitome of China’s street society. The description of lanes in Wang Anyi’s novels constitutes an integral part of her works involved Shanghai. According to Wang, life in lanes is part and parcel of Shanghai’s culture, while it’s the women in lanes that are able to exhibit the lane’s real perception. By reproducing the daily life in lanes, she pulls out the general meaning of existence for street people. Wang, through her unique life experience and rational thinking, endows the lane culture with poetic aesthetic form, which goes beyond the trivial and mediocre street life. Description of lane women in Wang’s novels, their daily routine being the keynote, reflects the harmonious coexistence of two genders in lanes as a cultural space. Hence, her writings, exhibiting a kind of gentle style, contain a stable human ecology and the author’s humanistic thinking.Based on Wang Anyi’s intention of writing, this dissertation tries to interpret the lane culture in Wang’s novel by means of reading and analyzing. The introduction part briefly mentions the significance and necessity of studying Wang Anyi’s lane culture writing after summarizing the status quo of researches on Wang Anyi. Chapter One elaborates on the lane culture reflected in the novel text from the perspective of Wang’s creation. This chapter mainly analyzes the images of female characters in lanes in Wang’s novels and also the lane lifestyle represented by them in order to further interpret the inner world of the author. Chapter Two discusses the feature of the lane culture and generalizes its property of being marginal, routine and patient. Chapter Three extracts the lane culture’s spiritual connotation of being stable, pragmatic and flexible.