The Narrative Art Of Chen Danyan’ Urban Girlhood Novels

Chen Danyan, one of the girlhood literature explorers, wrote a series of novels about girls that lived in the city without any rural background. The works depicted the various lives of the girls living in modern cities, hence were called "urban girlhood novels". With narratology and relevant theories, narrative arts of her novels were reviewed comprehensively in this paper.The realistic narrative technique of her urban girlhood novels was analyzed in the first section of this paper. In non-fantasy works, she recorded the lives of urban girls living in different times through integrating the experience of her own and carefully observing the lives of girls in current times; in fantasy works, she took the daily lives of the urban girls as the starting point and objective of her attention, adopted the narrative mode in daily lives, appropriately intermingled the realism and virtualism, and created a reality of world girls conjured up.The inward nature of her novels was interpreted in the second section of this paper. She excels in narrating the inner world of urban girls. Chen Danyan tends to choose the inward-depicting subjects demonstrating the girls’sentiment and spiritual growth, which include generation gap subject evincing inter-generation conflicts, friendship subject evincing partnership and puppy love subject evincing emotional entanglements between boys and girls; the adoption of fixed and multiple internal focalization narration constructed diversified inner world of figures, making the girls’ expression of emotion more natural and vivid; soliloquy, free association, psychological symbol and other narrative techniques directly infiltrated into the enigmatic inner world of the girls, hence, the works were possessed with a special psychological depth.The melancholy narration style of her novels was elaborated in the third section of this paper. Chen Danyan concentrated on depicting the hardship girls had experienced during adolescence and shaped a unique style of hardship narration; none of the figures she created were ideally sunny girls, rather, they were melancholy girls with various trauma and limitation, living in the "shadow" of life; the language in her novels were exquisite and deep and exuding a depressed and disappointed mood between lines. The melancholy here was generalized as a cultural spirit. This was closely related with her melancholy complex stemming from her sad childhood and foreign cultural sorrow.Chen Danyan has always been much close to a girl’s heart, connecting adult culture with adolescent culture. She demonstrated a desire to communicate with the girls. Her narration not only possessed western style approach and technique, but also had traditional Chinese flavor. The combination of the two presented rich connotation renders rich connotation to the work. In this paper her narrative arts were summarized as the three keywords:"realism","inward" and "melancholy" which led its way to further explore the value of Chen Danyan’s girlhood novels.