Zhang Ailing's Prose Style Research

Zhang Ailing is a writer with clear stylistic awareness. Although not many of her prose was collected and published, she created a whispering talk style for modern prose. Her prose, with no rigorous and regular structure, open and clear theme, really embodied the features of freedom, individuality and literariness of modern prose. People think from the origin that this kind of prose was affected by British essays.The prose written by Zhang Ailing featured monologue and lyric. The content of her prose is mainly about what she was experiencing, hearing, thinking and feeling, so it has the clear whispering feature and belongs to the lyric whispering style. From the respect of content, it can be classified into Rumor Genre and Zhang's Thinking Genre. Rumor Genre is based on the people, stories and environment surrounding the author and it's inward; while Zhang's Thinking Genre is the thoughts and comments about the art, customs and creation by the author and it's outward. These two genres are closely related and working together to reflect the author's desolate feelings about life.Zhang Ailing's prose presents the language style of defamiliarization. The language of her prose is rich in color and magnificent in vocabulary. She often used self-made new words, the new collocation of familiar words, and contrast of word meanings to create the defamiliarization of language. With the popular words and slang, poems and epigram widely used, the rhetoric methods such as novel metaphor and empathy as well as free and loose structure, her prose formed a style for popular tastes. The rich images in her prose formed the diverse image system of nature, material and feeling, in which especially the urban material and odor images were unique and created the image area for prose. The richness and beauty in language and image are unable to cover the desolate feeling and loneliness in intrinsic implication. She captured the popular fun in daily life to remove the intrinsic desolation. Therefore, the lonely and desolate era feeling and strong life interest formed a contradictory and unified inner tension in her prose.Zhang Ailing's prose are with the features of internal cooling and external heal, emotion and reason, solemn and humor. The forming of this style is related to the author's personality, artistic purport as well as her emotion as a woman. Furthermore, it's also connected with the unique regional feature of Shanghai, the demise of her family status and the market demands. Surely her uniqueness is also related to her in-depth knowledge in Chinese and Western literature. With the very above elements, Zhang Ailing became very popular in the lonely island of Shanghai.