Virginia Woolf In Wang Zengqi’s Poetic Fiction:A Literary Indebtedness Study

Wang Zengqi’s poetic fiction has enjoyed a high reputation for aesthetic values.Hailed as a master of poetic fiction,he was adept in assimilating foreign literatures.Researches into his literary indebtedness have been conducted incessantly,and this thesis,adopting Joseph T.Shaw’s theory of literary indebtedness,is dedicated to a study of Virginia Woolf’s influence on the development of Wang’s poetic fiction.Based on a detailed text analysis and an influence demonstration research,this thesis attempts to illustrate Wang’s reception of Woolf’s poetics,and to explore how Wang stylized and acclimatized Woolf and later developed in his own way a series of highly aesthetic poetic fiction.In the 1940 s,Wang pursued the literary aesthetics of Woolf.Woolf’s stream of consciousness fiction made Wang understand that fiction could render the beauty of poetry.Via stylization after Woolf’s works,his works formed a highly lyric style where stream of consciousness and prose poems walked hand in hand.His poetic fiction juvenilia had features as follows.First,highly illogical diction and a nebulous poetic context,which were achieved through the technique of stream of consciousness.Second,bold genre experimentation with almost-plotless fiction and highly emotional prose-poems.In the 1980 s,Wang returned to the literary arena as “a Chinese humanistic lyricist”.By this time,he had modified his early admiration for Woolf,and he resorted to Chinese classics for a further step towards high poetic fiction.On the one hand,he borrowed from Tao Qian the image of “Peach Blossom Shangri-la” to approach the ideal of poetic beauty.He worked with a simple and plain style to consciously deviate from the highly subjective lyricism and inexplicitness of his early career;picturesque rural scenes and beauty of healthy humanity were achieved through simple and concise words in “The Love Story of a Young Monk” and “A Tale of Big Nur”.On the other,he developed his narratology of a prosaic structure according to his understanding,at that time,of poetic expressions and poetic context in Woolf’s stream of consciousness fiction.Consequently,his loose and free prosaic narrative proceeded simultaneously from the spatial and temporal dimensions,which contributed to a segmented plot,and yet smart foreshadowing and echoing facilitated a substantial integration of the whole structure.