"Border Town", "River": Space Narrative And Artistic Features Of Poetic Novels

Chinese poetic novel budded from Lu Xun’s "Drama", "Hometown", developed by Fei Ming’s "Bridge", "Story of The Bamboo Grove", to Shen Congwen’s "Border Town", "The Long River", it has been basically mature. As the representative works of the Chinese poetic novels, "Border Town" and "The Long River" not only inherits the previous poetic novel’s characteristic features, such as weaken the tine, strengthen the space, weaken the plot and lay emphasis on artistry, but also have more mature narrative space, narrative strategy and narrative structure. In the narrative space, traditional novels are generally set big social background to provide broad space for the characters, while "Border Town" and "The Long River" set up a closed natural space and social space, and by setting the "water", "ship", "white pagoda", "bamboo grove", "mandarin", "new life " and other images to construct the space. In the narrative strategy, each chapter and section of "Border Town" and "The Long River" is connected into a whole by space not by the time cues. Therefore, the narrative strategy of poetic novels are no longer traditional time narrative strategies, but through the space transformation to promote the development of plot. In the narrative structure, the structure of "Border Town" and "The Long River" can be called "paintings in series", each chapter of them can form a painting, some are fresh and elegant, and some are multicolored and bright. All the paintings can be unified together by the theme and artistry, and form the paintings in series. The artistic characteristic of Chinese poetic novels can be seen by analyzing the spatial narrative of "Border Town" and "The Long River".