Beyond the Voices We Hear: Diversified Focalization Modes in the Yueyue Xiaoshuo Short Stories, 1906–9

Abstract

The last two decades have revealed new significance in the late Qing fiction in the transformation of Chinese literature, which has convincingly challenged the long-held discourse that a group of writers associated with the May Fourth New Literature Movement in the late 1910s fundamentally broke with the literary tradition and became the forerunners of modern Chinese literature. This article studies the short stories published in the popular literary magazine Yueyue xiaoshuo (also known as All-Story Monthly, 1906–9) and finds out that the narrative approaches adopted in the short stories are diverse and experimental, breaking from the preceding customs. While examining the narrative approaches in the short stories, this paper focuses on the aspect of focalization. Adopting the idea of focalization mode as an observatory point is particularly useful for discussing short stories in All-Story Monthly, because the diversified and flexible arrangement of observatory positions and the selection of the narrative information (such as a character’s appearance, action, and speech) to be presented are exactly crucial aspects in which the short stories display marked innovation or modification of the traditional narrative modes.

Keywords

Yueyue xiaoshuo / Chinese short stories / late Qing / focalization mode

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Higher Education Press