| dc.description.abstract | “Misery” was the description that was often used to reflect Taiwan and Mainland China. It has been a traditional topic as well since the new literature was born. Especially for the Subaltern in the country literature, the poverty of materials and the fragility of life were often the strategies for writers to describe stories. Huang Chun-ming, a Taiwanese writer in his 1960s to 1970s, created plain country writing in distinctive and vivid diction. Albeit the miseries that the characters suffered in his novels were the products of the turn of different times, humanity and morality could always be seen. Huang’s works presented his passion for the country. Huang always sympathized the Subaltern, so he often described the characters’ struggle in real life. Although he stopped writing for a period of time. Until 1980s to 1990s, Huang returned to the Lanyang Plain. He concerned the countryside invaded by the urban civilization, and he led readers to explore the issue of existential miseries in rural experience that was mysterious and full of death. Simultaneously, Yan Lian-ke, a productive writer in Mainland China, was reinterpreting the writing of the new country literature in modernism way. Yan was good at combining disease with existential miseries, which led to the final release of death, as well as the foreshadow that it was impossible to change the fate. For those who had read Yan’s literary works, it was really hard to get out of the existential scenes like nightmares because Yan described the Chinese rural miserable circumstances truly and clearly. Yan’s thrilling wording and details were like mournful elegiac verses, which presented the humble situations of the Subaltern.
This thesis is based on the country literature, aiming at misery writing for the Subaltern in different areas, exemplifying two renowned writers, Huang Chun-ming and Yan Lian-ke. As for the areas, characters, and events of the texts in their novels, the thesis makes an observation and comparison in a narrative way to completely present the distinguishing features and development between the country misery works in Taiwan and those in Mainland China. It is common that literature has been involved in real life and public affairs since the May 4th Movement of 1919. When literature could afford the responsibility to reflect social life, the writers in both Taiwan and Mainland China paid more attention to the bottom of the society. They knew that they could not use their pens to solve the problems of the Subaltern; however, they could touch the readers’ humanities and moralities. Especially in such a commercialized pattern of consumption, these two writers had the courage to face the reality directly and tried their best to speak for the public in silence. Under different temporal, spatial, and cultural circumstances, as well as facing the same country misery writing, this thesis is to discriminate the differences and specialties of these two writers’ narrative ways and social concern.
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