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Entrapment and Enclosure: The Poetics of Space and Time in Yu Hua’s Two Short Stories

Yu Hua’s two short stories, “Boy in the Twilight” and “The Boisterous Game,” are contextualized in a productive dialogue with studies of the short story genre and its narrative strategies, as well as in the context of contemporary China and its not-sodistant past. Specifically, this article focuses on the poetics of space and time in the two stories. Yu Hua conveys the characters’ tragic and fatalistic vision of life—the ubiquity of entrapment and enclosure—through his poetic use of compressed time and constricted space, thereby depicting the daily life of those alienated individuals who were swept up by China’s economic reforms and the general trend of “looking ahead to the future” of the post-Mao era.