On The Styles Of The Chineseshort Stories In The21st Century

The Chinese short stories in the New Century achieved great success in both quantity and quality. Based on extensive in-depth reading, related references, and other studies on Chinese short stories in the New Century, this research aims at discovering the genre features in these short stories.In the first section, this study begins by reviewing the history of short stories in the context of Chinese contemporary literature. Then, a description of the boom of short stories in the New Century is given, which contains theme, character, and topic. The prosperity of short stories in the New Century has lots of motivations, such as social background, advantages of short stories, and author’s creation motivations, etc.Then, this study offers a detailed argument on the genres of short stories in the New Century. There are four parts in this section:narrative types, modes, structures, and strategies. The basic narrative types are "Narrative","Psychological" and "Lyrical", and so on. Narrative modes relate to the selection of persons and perspectives, settings in narrative time and space. Narrative structure refers to structure of a story, such as "Progressive","Embedded","Staggered", etc. In this section, the use of metaphors, symbolization, contradiction, and irony in short stories in the New Century are also discussed.Finally, this paper pays attention to the historical relationship between genres of short stories in the New Century and those of Old Chinese short stories and Western short stories. Apart from the inheritance from old Chinese notes stories and Huaben, the short stories in the New Century benefited a lot from those by some Western contemporary authors, such as Calvino’s and Carver’s work.