Research On The Writing Of Flood In Novels Since The New Period

As a frequent natural disaster in reality,floods have brought countless losses of life and property and hard-to-heal mental wounds to human beings.Flood myths were common in almost all of the early civilizations of the East and West.Humanity’s management and struggle against floods have never stopped.Flood writing always concerns human.In the process of encountering the flood,people must face the problem of how to understand themselves and the laws of nature,and how to deal with the relationship between man and society and between man and nature.The flood in literature is not only the background of the story and the tool of the sudden turn of the plot,but also a rich cultural,political and philosophical connotation given by the writers as different expressions of the "water" imagery.The research object of this paper is to study flood writing in fiction since the new period(from 1978 to the present).By sorting out the writing context of flood myths,flood disasters,and flood governance in literary history,this paper aims to explore the flood writing from both its aesthetic and metaphorical perspective,with an analysis of the writer’s inheritance and development of his/her literary predecessors and the spirit of modernity in certain stage of history.This paper is organized in three chapters.The first chapter combines the"myth-prototype" theory and extracts the prototype of "destroy the world-creation of the world" and the prototype of "water control hero" from the flood myths of "Noah’s Ark" and "Da Yu’s water control",and discusses how they form a deep cultural and psychological structure that has been steadily passed down.In the literature of the new period,especially the "root-seeking literature",mobilizing and transforming the mythological resources of China and the West is not only the writing preference of a certain writer,but a collective creative tendency.This reflects the efforts of contemporary writers to explore a way that can reconstruct China’s image,tell Chinese stories,and bring Chinese literature to the world between "traditionality" and"modernity".In the second chapter,from the connotation,narrative ethics and aesthetic dimensions of disaster literature,the powerful flood in these literary creations highlights the fragility and finiteness of life,providing a stage for demonstrating the unyielding spirit of resistance,the human will to survive,and the complex human nature under extreme survival circumstances.They are all form a strong artistic tension,evoking a wide range of common human emotions and giving writers endless literary imagination and creative enthusiasm.By re-examining the various disasters in China over the past century in the new period,the writers intends to use them to explore the cultural source of the Chinese nation’s survival.Through the fictional depictions of floods,the authors examine how human beings are driven by fear to spiritual alienation and lack of self-identity,and how floods thus symbolize the most common and profound existential dilemma of modern citizens.The flood in science fiction is the possible cause of the end of the world,which reflects the universal concern for the fate and future of human beings in the age of globalization.The third chapter sorts out the political metaphors formed in the literary tradition of flood governance,and shows that its connotations will continue to evolve and update with the political,economic and ideological changes of the times.Accordingly,flood governance epitomizes social governance,and the way to govern water functions similarly as the way to govern people,minds and nations.This chapter analyzes how the writer responds to important propositions about China’s modernity imagination,such as democracy,science,and humanitarianism through the writing of water governance.