A Study On The Urban Spaces In The Novels Of The Rightists And The Educated Youth In The Early Stage Of The Neo-Era

It was in the early stage of the Neo-Era that the city regained its legitimization in Chinese contemporary novels and there were many descriptions about cities in the novels of this period. Applying the approaches developed in the field of urban cultural study in the West since 1970s, my thesis highlights the characteristic of urban space in re-outlining the developments of the novels in the early stage of the Neo-Era and explores the differences between the novels written by the Rightists and those by the Educated Youth with underlining demonstrations and analyses of the different descriptions of cities in works of these two types of writers. Within this context, the paper tends to ascribe such differences to political unconsciousness and power relationship behind them. This thesis contains four chapters, of which the first three chapters takes the household, the street and the university as typical urban spaces to examine and then present a study of the city in multi-space in the last chapter.