Urban Novels And Narrative Research In The 1990s

Since the 20^th century,urban novels,as a new literary power,have raised in the Chinese literary circles.With the acceleration of the urbanization in China,in the middle of and late 1990s,urban novels formed a magnificent urban novels tendency.They inherit the features of urban novels in 1980s of expressing the flourishing and bleakness of the urban life,and at the same time,they write the urbanites'unique psychology,showing the disparate aesthetic special characteristics.Based on the broad historical and cultural background,this thesis attempts to reveal the changes and developments of urban novels in 1990s from three perspectives:characters,narrative subjects and narrative techniques.Introduction introduces the background and significance of this thesis and reviews the researches concerned with urban novels in the modern literary world.What's more,it makes a clear definition about the key term of“urban novels”,establishing the scope of the study.Chapter one is based on the timeline to hackle the change process of urban novels'narrative theme.It divides the urban novels in 1990s into three categories and focuses on the analysis for the different characteristics of these three categories:the unique new realistic novels are concerned with life trivial of urban life;popular desire novels focus on the revelry in material and body;nostalgic novels that returned to nature gradually in the middle and later period express the memory to culture.Chapter two is concerned about all kinds of urbanites who are divided into two categories in terms of sex—female and male.For female,it analyzes their evolution of personal consciousness.They are from the obedient“bottom flower”to the independent“office lady”and finally to unique“new social group”.For male,it studies their change process in personality by analyzing the clearing up of the traditional images and the appearance of the new images.Chapter three explores the new changes in the narrative techniques.In the aspect of narrative model,although urban novels in 1990s still concentrate on the desire expression,the emergence of poetic narration and legendary narration brought fresh atmosphere to materialistic style of writing.What's more,narrative angle adopts multiple perspectives flexibly instead of using first person narration only.Moreover,in narrative dimension,the urban novels in 1990s lays more emphasis on the narrative space than narrative time,describing the trivial life in the changing scenes.In addition,narrative space becomes more personalized,from collective exterior space to more secret interior space.Chapter four mainly studies the causes of narrative features of urban novels from the perspectives of background of times and creation subjects.The causes can not be analyzed without the consideration of urban culture context in 1990s.The unique urban culture context gives birth to the theme of urban novels,and to some extent,affects the attitude towards the literary creation of the writers.Conclusion summarizes the urban novels in 1990s and draws the conclusion that the creation of urban novels in a difficult position though it looks flourishing.Urban novels have to get rid of fixed literary creation and writing style and seek for the new features and the new state,in order to get a place in the numerous literary creations.