The Reture To Countryside, Nostalgia And Despair

The prosperity of city novels is an important phenomenon of China's literature in the 1990s. Through text analysis and literature research, this thesis cards the main spiritual tendencies of the city novels in 1990s, and concludes that there are three spiritual tendencies: the return to countryside, nostalgia and despair. Chapter One firstly gives a general description of the urbanization process in China in the 1990s and then a definition of city novels. Chapter Two, Three and Four, based on some texts and literature research, demonstrate the three spiritual tendencies respectively, and at the same time explore the literary and cultural causes for these tendencies.Through text analysis, culture research and phenomenon carding, this thesis holds that in the city novels of the 1990s, city is imagined as a huge material space, which exists only as a material matter and lacks the poetic air and inner spirit necessary for human existence. The three tendencies (the return to countryside, nostalgia and despair) correlate deeply with the cultural context, while the wounded experience caused by the dramatic transference of the modernity in the 1990s and the decline of the modern Utopian ideals in the same period are the social cultural reasons for these spiritual tendencies.