A Study Of Chen Danyan’s Youth Novels

In the historical narrative of contemporary literature,youth literature is in a kind of marginal position.Whenever the concept of youth literature is mentioned,people usually associate it with post-80 s writer groups such as Han Han and Guo Jingming.When studying youth literature,scholars tend to treat it as a cultural phenomenon and do not have a high opinion of the text’s infantile artistic standard.Post-80 s youth literature,however,obviously cannot encapsulate the developmental lineage of contemporary youth literature.As an early contemporary writer who engaged in youth novels,Chen Danyan’s depiction of cruel youth is worth exploring,both in terms of thematic ideas and artistic techniques.The analysis and examination of Chen’s youth novels can,to a certain extent,correct the current stereotype of youth literature as being of low artistic quality.This paper consists of four chapters,which will discuss Chen Danyan’s youth novels in three parts.The first chapter is the introduction,which mainly discusses the background and significance of this paper,then defines the core concepts and compares the current situation of Chen Danyan’s youth novels research,and finally clarifies the research ideas and framework of this paper,which are the basis of the whole text.The second chapter takes the thematic classification of novels as the entry point to refine the connotation of the cruel youth in Chen Danyan’s youth novels.First,it examines and analyzes the three major spiritualized themes of Chen Danyan’s youth novels: the discipline of school,the shaping of family,and the redemption of youth.On this basis,the psychological connotations of the novel’s cruel youth are analyzed,specifically covering the three major themes of freedom,loneliness and meaningless experience.Finally,the essence of the cruel youth is extracted,which is expressed as the dilemma of not being able to become "oneself" and the inescapable experience of loss in growing up.The third chapter analyzes the artistic characteristics of Chen’s youth novels.Chen Dan-yan’s skillful use of internalized narrative presents the spiritual experience of adolescence in a delicate way.The multiple internal focus and psychological narrative techniques are important components of the internalized narrative,and through the skillful use of both,the text is imbued with a melancholic style.This artistic style is the product of the writer’s personal experience,delicate emotions and sincere creative attitude,and it points to dissatisfaction with the loss of life’s possibilities.Therefore,Chen Danyan tries to reconcile with the pains of adolescence on a psychological level by writing vicariously with reminiscent overtones.The fourth chapter refines the meaning of Chen Dan-yan’s youth novels by reading them in comparison with youth novels of different periods.By comparing them with the works of Wang Meng and Yang Mo,we can find that most of the adolescents in Chen Danyan’s novels face the distress of early love and the confusion of choosing their life path.The different psychological experiences embodied in the texts reveal the changes in youthful experiences when collectivism turns to individualism.The decline of collectivist thinking is a realistic context that Chen Danyan shares with Han Han and Guo Jingming,two post-80 s writers,but they show different ways of writing.This chapter takes the youth experience as the base of discourse and examines the differences in artistic style between Chen Danyan’s youth novels and works from different periods,so as to refine the significance of Chen Danyan’s cruel youth writing,specifically in terms of the writer’s transcendence of traumatic adolescent memories and his tolerance of growing up as an ordinary person.