The Style of Liu Naou's Works

The prosperity of urban literature is a trend in the 1930s. Beijing school, Shanghai school and left-wing writers all have urban narratives. However, compared with Lao She's civilian perspective, Beijing school's antipathy and hatred for the city, and left-wing rational mentality, New Sensation School provides a more novel and profound way for new literature to understand the city. Liu Naou uses his modern feelings to feel the metropolitan life in Shanghai and to experience the living conditions of urbanites in detail.

In his literary works, Liu Naou regards the city itself as an independent aesthetic object for the first time. Secondly, he subverts the tradition by analyzing the moral decay and poetic deficiency of urban life. Finally, he makes more use of modern techniques such as stream of consciousness and montage, so that Shanghai, a metropolis, is no longer a vague existence hidden behind the narrative of characters, but exists as an independent aesthetic object. Modern urban life has come to the front desk, and for the first time, it has entered the reader's sight with an independent face. As Fuhui Wu said, the "century" flavor of 20th century literature refers to the urban characteristics of Liu Naou's urban novels.

First, the unique cognition and feeling of the city: Liu Naou, a new sensation expert who is obsessed with skyscrapers, trains, street lamps and cheongsam, shows the richness, prosperity, lewdness, charm, enjoyment and complexity of modern cities.

All aspects of urban life are vividly in Liu Naou's works, just as the beauty of history books thinks: Liu Naou is obviously keen on describing urban landscapes, taking them as his own gaze and eroticizing them. In most of Liu Naou's novels, he uses concrete language to describe all aspects of urban life and its material culture. Even the moral decay of this city is quite attractive under such a language paste. Liu Naou is obsessed with urban landscape. A series of urban landscapes are presented in Liu Naou's works and painted with the color of urban materialism, which has become a unique and beautiful landscape in the history of modern literature.

2. Subversion of traditional morality and life experience: He described the absurd tragedy of real life with sharp brushstrokes. For example, in the novel Game, the author describes a woman who regards love as a game and associates with two men at the same time. When she decided to marry one of them, she gave her virginity to the other. The novel shows the outlook on life and love of some fashionable women at that time, and reveals the moral decay in the real world. Left-wing writers at that time thought that his works were "un-China" or "unrealistic", so they were not fair and objective. Liu Naou perceived the crux of the city with his unique sensitivity, and made the most authentic anatomy and display.

Third, using montage, stream of consciousness, sentimentalism and psychoanalysis: Liu Naou's active pursuit of "new" style brought heterogeneous characteristics to China literary world under the cover of left-wing literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The defamiliarization language method, film montage method and stream of consciousness creation method used in his novels have overflowed the traditional novel creation mode, so don't find another way. Du Heng thinks that Liu Naou first adopted a technique suitable for urban description, while Du Heng's technique is an artistic expression technique with obvious modernity, such as stream of consciousness, montage and psychological monologue.

China's traditional literature mostly expresses characters' personalities through words and actions, but less direct psychological description. The use of stream of consciousness and montage to express the inner feelings of characters is a unique technique in modern literature. China's traditional literature, especially novels, developed in chronological order. Although there are many narrative and flashback techniques, which are linear narrative or network structure as a whole, the flow of the plot is coherent regardless of the linear structure or network structure. The sharp leap of time and space and characters' psychology is a new attempt of modern novels and one of the main features of Liu Naou's urban novels.