Writing. New Era Novels Suffering

Suffering, as an essential attribute of human being and a basic theme of literature, is impossible to be avoided. This paper is a description about suffering written in Chinese novels since the beginning of the new era in detail. Since the end of the "Cultural Revolution", the development of Chinese literature in a new era has been characterized by unique characteristics. The special history and concerning memories gave contemporary Chinese writers unique experiences and understandings of the sufferings. Then, how they explained and presented sufferings in their novels? Was their any change or transformation in their description about sufferings? How these changes happened? In writing about sufferings, what are the characteristics of different writers from different times, different groups? Why they have such characteristics? This thesis focus on the issues mentioned above.This thesis consists of four chapters in addition to the full text of the introduction and conclusion. The first chapter analyzes the novels about sufferings in the writing of "Injury" "Reflection" after the "Cultural Revolution". According to the characteristics of writing about suffering in this period, the thesis summarized a theme——political suffering. During this period, the major suffering writers are "rightists" and educated youth. This chapter tries to compare and analyze their similarities and differences. These writers re-write the miseries in "Cultural Revolution" in the mid-1980s. This chapter analyzes some new ideas, new mentality in this period, and tries to find causes of them.Chapter 2 analyzes the writings that pay close attention to sufferings in everyday life from the mid-1980s to the present. According to the writers' understanding of suffering in this period, this paper names the suffering "Secularity suffering". Writers discussed in this chapter are attached to "new realism" writers and some "new-generation" writers. This chapter compares and analyzes the differences in describing sufferings by different writers from different groups or by writers in the same group.There are also some writers who lived in the same period as the writers mentioned in the first and second chapter of this thesis, while showing outstanding personality in their novels. The third chapter mainly analyzes these writers and their works, including Wang Zengqi, A Cheng in the 1980s, Yan Lianke, Zhang Chengzhi, Shi Tiesheng in the 1990s, and so on. This chapter not only sums up characteristics of suffering writing, but also explained why they have such characteristics..Based on the analysis in the preceding chapters, the fourth chapter sums up two distinct types of discourse of novels since the new era——enlightenment discourse and survival discourse. Meanwhile this part of the paper analyzes the reasons for such change in two ways——the limits in enlightenment discourse of suffering writing in the new era and the evolution of context of the times and orientation of the writers' spirit.