Most of Xu Di-shan's short-short stories published in Fiction Monthly in the 1920s in Shanghai, are traditionally regarded as "prose." In fact his famous works such as "Peanut," "Mask," "Cicada," "Snake," "A Praise to Ghost," etc. belong to the new genre "Short-short story," also known as "Flash fiction," or "Sudden fiction." This thesis analyzes the technique of Xu's short-short stories by way of Viktor Shklovsky's "defamiliarization" theory, in the hope of offering the reader a new approach to Xu's "prose".
