The Spatial Narrative of Beijing City from the Perspective of Literary Geography: A Study on Wang Shuo’s Wild Beast
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/bex0e328Keywords:
Wild Beast, spatial narrative, literary geography, literary mapping, Beijing city.Abstract
This paper explores the spatial narrative of Beijing depicted in Wang Shuo’s Wild Beast from the perspective of literary geography. Combining close textual reading, spatial event annotation, event group coding and literary mapping based on QGIS, this study analyzes how the novel constructs the urban landscape of Beijing through character movements, named locations and spatial containers. A spatial container in this research refers to a repeatedly mentioned region consisting of multiple internal nodes in the narrative. The research identifies 209 spatial events, 34 event groups, 34 points of named locations, 6 routes of event groups and 2 major spatial containers. The results reveal that movement ranks as the most frequent type of spatial event. Most named locations do not serve as narrative centers, but function as route markers or reference points throughout the story. Narrative intensity is concentrated in two core spatial containers: the protagonist’s residential compound and the area in front of the school gate near Milan’s residence. Together, these two areas cover 23 out of the 34 event groups. It can be concluded that Beijing in Wild Beast is not presented as a static geographical image. Instead, it forms a layered narrative space shaped by the interplay of geographical points, travel routes, spatial containers and fragmented memories.
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