From Psychological Modernism to a Poetics of Everyday Life: The Evolution of Wang Zengqi’s Fictional Style and Its Driving Forces

Abstract

Existing scholarship has concentrated on the “poetics of everyday life” in Wang Zengqi’s post-1979 fiction, while his early modernist experiments have often been treated as an immature or separate phase. As a result, the mechanism of his stylistic transition and the continuity between his early and late artistic practices remain insufficiently explained. Taking “Fuchou” (Revenge), “Jiya Mingjia” (The Master of Poultry), “Shoujie” (Initiation into Monkhood), and “Danao Jishi” (Tales of the Big Marsh) as its core texts, this article combines close reading, diachronic comparison, and contextual analysis of Wang’s literary statements, artistic practice, and historical circumstances. It examines changes in narrative structure, characterization, linguistic rhythm, and aesthetic orientation. The analysis shows that Wang’s early fiction, shaped in important ways by Woolfian psychological modernism, renders tense subjective experience through psychological time, weakened plotting, structural discontinuity, and linguistic defamiliarization. His later fiction shifts its aesthetic center toward everyday life, local customs, and vernacular ethics, developing a poetics of everyday life marked by restraint, ellipsis, and the resilience of ordinary existence. This transition does not negate his early experimentation; rather, techniques of linguistic control, detail management, and weak plotting are internalized from conspicuous formal devices into an apparently effortless narrative mode. The transformation was jointly enabled by Wang’s modernist training at National Southwest Associated University, his grassroots experience, his work in traditional opera, and the cultural climate of the New Period. By conceptualizing the transition as “continuity within rupture,” this article reinterprets Wang’s aesthetic trajectory and defines his poetics of everyday life as a locally grounded paradigm distinct from both the aestheticization of everyday life in consumer culture and classical Chinese theories of artistic conception.