Abstract：The“road narrative” is a subgenre within web literature that focuses on narrating characters' travel experiences. Set against the backdrop of road journeys, these novels partially inherit narrative elements from road movies and travel literature. During their dissemination within the online literary sphere, they have gradually developed distinctive and paradigmatic narrative modes centered around character development, gendered perspectives, and spatial circularity. This type of fiction weaves a series of fabricated tales centered around the geographical landscape of “counter-urban” spaces, narrating how individual souls achieve harmonious unity with the untouched natural world during their journeys. It crafts a homogenizing approach for individuals to envision solutions for “urban maladies” across diverse scenarios. Even though road novels expand the geographical imaginary of web literature and respond to the spiritual crises of modernity through fictionalized romantic plots, their narrative focus remains persistently fixed on themes of emotion and sexuality. As a result, the diverse geographical landscapes featured within these novels are often reduced to mere backdrops serving the construction of emotional stories. Potential political, social, and historical issues inherent in the road-trip theme are thereby simplified and obscured. The critical potential and imaginative capacity of road narratives to engage with the dilemmas of modernity thus become superficial, thus exposing a profound contradiction between the thematic subgenres of web literature and their dominant narrative modes.
2025, Vol. 42 
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