A Study Of Yao Yuanchu’s Novels

Yao Yuanchu, born at Songjiang in1892and died in1954, was named as the "Titan of Nan League". He is not only an elegant talented poet but also a distinguished demotic novelist. At the end of Qing dynasty, his great achievement in novel and story indicates a new compass after critical novel time. His talent in novel is inapproachable and the article even makes the spirits envy, which is commented by Liu Yazi. Zheng Yimei also appraised that his style of writing is outstanding, full of inflexion thinking and even better than his teacher.Yao Yuanchu plays a very important role during the Chinese neoteric novel history. Although his works are very outstanding among the writers at the beginning of the republic of China, in the long run his image and value was not regarded as important as later Qing dynasty novelists and Wusi new literature writers. Just as Huang Lin, who is the president of Shanghai Classical literature association and the dean of the Chinese classical literature study center of Fudan University, said at the "Yunjian Literature Seminar" held at Songjiang on11th June2011,"There are a lot of great litterateurs from Songjiang during the neoteric novel history, such as Yao Yuanchu and Chen Jinghan, who are the founder and beginner of the Chinese neoteric literature. But in the past long time they are overlooked and even never mentioned in the most of the works about Shanghai literature history. It is really unfair for them." Songjiang should be very proud of Yao Yuanchu, the model of Songjiang litterateurs. So it is very necessary to study and discover him and his works.The thesis elaborates Yao Yuanchu’s novel in three features as following.Firstly, the thesis looks back into Yao Yuanchu’s colorful life time and creating process according to the time background. It studies how he shows his gift in writing and sparks in literature. It analyzes classical and new literature’s impacts on his knowledge structure and how his great achievement is driven by the poetic and smart thinking.The second chapter studies Yao Yuanchu’s long novels. It concretely analyzes the content and artistic features. For the content, Yao Yuanchu’s novels are various and almost cover all kinds of the types of that time. The chapter addresses itself on the most representative works, love novels and social novels. With the study on the works "tune of swallow’s touch the zither string","Lonely bateau on the wrathful sea" and "The utility man’s saying",it reflects Yao’s three artistic achievements. One is the representation for the roles characteristics, social prospects and fresh ideas of sentimental emotion. One is the changes of the bel-esprit. The other is the exploration for the concept of the traditional scholar’s novel.The third chapter is the emphasis of the thesis. It mainly takes Yao Yuanchu’s short story as incision. It studies his works impacted by theoverlap time of new and old age. It also studies how Yao’s short story creating, which combines his own innovation idea with the heritage coming from his teacher Lin Shu’s translation works. Firstly, it analyzes the Yao’s self created short stories which differs in foreign country story, swordsmen story and fable party story. Secondly, it states that Yao’s story expresses the new knowledge and argument. It represents the social life with historical and biographic writing. It reveals cruelty of the war booming from a slight point of view. Based on the three features, it addresses itself on the short story’s artistic characteristic. It describes his heritage and development from Lin Shu in five aspects in imagism thinking, new woman character creating, paleography and repeat structure, narrative and descriptive method’s breakthrough in artistic mode, and innovation.Finally there is the general conclusion. It is the conversion time of Chinese literature when Yao Yuanchu starts his writing career. The novelist is bold enough to explore and penetrate the problems how to inherit and develop our eminent ethical literary tradition, how to deal with the various foreign literatures, how to deal with the relationship between literature, time and politics, how to create a new literature style and form, etc.