Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.1, 2022 

 

“Only the Spring Breeze Is Blowing There”: Examining the Narration of Time in Wang Chunfeng (Looking at the Spring Breeze)

(Abstract)

 

He Ping

 

To some extent, fiction is an illusion of time. By choosing the physical time, the novelist weaves the fictional time and narrative logic, and gives them meaning. Wang chunfeng neither avoids, nor relies too much on important historical events and historical nodes of modern China as the “enhanced time” to promote the fictional narrative. By contrast, it mixes different times, including lunar calendar and Gregorian calendar, and obvious and hidden time marks, connecting the village and personal time as well as the mixed world outlook and daily life in contemporary Chinese rural areas. Thus, the work forms the synchronic and intertextuality of the novel text, giving birth to a dialogic reflection on the fate of contemporary Chinese villages.