Study On Li Bihua’s Ghost And Monster Novels

In Hong Kong literature,Li Bihua’s works combine elegance and vulgarity,and present themes of Hong Kong social psychology,identity,women’s perception,and historical writing in a narrative that traverses the past and the present,and the cycle of life and death.Li Bihua has always loved to write about ghosts and monsters,and her ghost and monster novels originate from the traditional tales of the miraculous.In her writing,she consciously follows the tradition of Chinese literature,reflecting the current situation of the world and the complex emotions of Hong Kong people by writing about ghosts and strange things.Using a combination of close textual reading and comparative analysis,this thesis examines the ideological connotations and unique underpinnings of Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels from four perspectives: generation opportunities,ghostly forms of existence,narrative style,and textual values.First of all,in terms of the opportunity of generation,the thesis looks at the origin of Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels from the specific region of Hong Kong.Hong Kong has never lacked writers who write about ghosts and monsters,but only Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels are unique.Hong Kong’s popular literature,colonial context,folk culture,and personal upbringing broaden the creative horizons of Lee’s ghost novels and become the source of her creative power.Secondly,Li Bihua,who specializes in writing about love and hate,presents three forms of ghostly existence in her ghost and monster novels: female ghosts seeking love,ghosts and monsters seeking revenge,and human ghosts uniting,in order to look at the individual existence in modern society.Li Bihua,who is passionate about writing about love,uses cold words to show the female ghosts who are obsessed with the pursuit of love,so as to contrast the alienated and indifferent love of modern people,and to perspective the love and desire of modern men and women in the city.In addition,she also wrote a group of vengeful ghosts and monsters.They use Medea’s vengeance to cut off male love entanglements and gain a wide space for female existence.Li Bihua’s bizarre style of writing is given full play in the form of the unity of human and ghosts in the main body.By showing the ghostly side of them,Li Bihua truly recreates the group of individuals in Hong Kong society who have been eroded by desire but have no intention of awakening.In addition,in terms of narrative style,Li Bihua’s bizarre writing style can be summarized into three categories: bizarre ghostly narratives,violent death narratives and fatal reincarnation narratives.She uses these three types of narratives to build up the horrific atmosphere and tragic effect of her novels,thus presenting her perception of death and her pessimism of fatalism.Growing up in a commercialized writing environment,Li Bihua keenly chooses the sounds and spatial scenes of everyday life to construct the ghostly narratives,showing the horrific effect of ghosts and monsters around her.In constructing the narratives of her novels with elements such as violence and death,Li Bihua reveals the selfish and indifferent cultural mentality of Hong Kong people and her own thoughts on death.Li Bihua,who believes in predestined karma,envelops the fate of the characters in tragedy through the circular structure of the reincarnation narrative in her creation.Finally,the thesis explores Li Bihua’s humanistic examination and compassion shown in her ghost and monster texts from three perspectives: comparing traditional tales of the miraculous novels,awakening female consciousness,and recreating Hong Kong society.The thesis first compares Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels with traditional tales of the miraculous to explore two transcendent aspects of Li Bihua’s novels.First,Li Bihua’s novels continue Pu Songling’s tradition of flower demons and foxes,and interpret a group of more destructive and self-conscious ghosts and monsters in the form of new stories.Secondly,Li Bihua,who consciously inherits the traditional model of love between spirits and monsters,incorporates modern love awareness into the tradition,making love more subversive.In terms of the awakening of female consciousness,Li Bihua constructs her own female thinking through the act of female ghosts and monsters pursuing and destroying men.She makes the ghosts and monsters manifest in the city of Hong Kong and reproduces the absurdity of Hong Kong social life through them,thus showing her philosophy of caring for society despite her disappointment with reality.In conclusion,the thesis focuses on origins of Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels,the existence of the characters in her ghost world and her unique narrative style,and deepens the interpretation of the literary,ideological and social values of her ghost and monster novels.It is found that Li Bihua’s ghost and monster novels incorporate her unique understanding of love and philosophy of life,presenting the horror and urbanity of the world of ghosts and monsters,and presenting complex human entanglements.