The course of Shanghai style literature

Since the May 4th New Literature was initiated, the tradition of Shanghai-style novels has been impacted, and the initiators of new literature have done their utmost to mock the capabilities of Shanghai-style writers. If Guo Moruo and other creative societies made their fortune in Shanghai, Professor Liu Bannong laughed at him as a "Shanghai poet"; When Lu Xun came to sum up the Shanghai literati, he simply used the hammer of "talented hooligans". In fact, among the literati in Beijing, Liu Bannong and Lu Xun are both southerners, more like "Shanghai School".

In the crusade, a new Shanghai novel appeared, that is, the novel of Yu Dafu, the founder of the creation society. I started writing while studying in Japan. His depression, loneliness and suicide all infected the international symptoms at the end of the century and had no direct influence on the local culture. Yu Dafu doesn't like Shanghai. He is basically critical of Shanghai's culture, but this critical spirit has enabled him to write a novel "A Night Intoxicated by Spring Breeze" which is closely related to Shanghai. This work has not broken away from the old traditional model of talented people and beautiful women, but its identity has changed. The man became a wandering modern intellectual, and the woman was a female worker in Shanghai cigarette factory, perhaps a female worker who came from the countryside to work in the city.

The wandering intellectuals in Yu Dafu's works have no conscious revolutionary consciousness, and his hatred for women workers in society stays in the position of simple justice and resistance. However, with the rapid development of the Great Revolution in the 1920s, revolutionary consciousness has increasingly become a topic of public concern. Not only have many radical intellectuals been involved, but they have also become heroes in the public consciousness. Especially in Shanghai, a city with a huge labor force, the revolutionary situation inevitably began from then on. In the process of the development of new literature to "revolutionary literature", Shanghai-style writers created a large number of romantic lyrical roads of popular literature Yu Along Dafu. The protagonists are all revolutionary intellectuals, who are romantic in this city, constantly attracting modern and enthusiastic city girl, and tirelessly staged scenes of "revolution plus love". It is still the tangled fantasy of multi-angle love, and it is still the erotic scream of the modern version of talented people and beautiful women. Ding Ling, Jiang Guangci, Ba Jin, Pan Hannian, Ye Lingfeng and other fashion writers all took Shanghai as their theme and created a new revolutionary Shanghai-style literature.

The literary history in 1930s was an era when two Shanghai-style literary traditions developed fully at the same time. The representative works of the former include the works of "New Sensation School" writers such as Liu Naou, Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun. The representative work of the latter is Mao Dun's Midnight. However, it should be emphasized that although they represent different tendencies of Shanghai-style literature, they are not completely separated in many aspects. For example, the depiction of modernity is also one of the artistic features of Midnight. Modernity makes the novel full of vitality. Grandpa Wu, a feudal zombie, died of "modernity" as soon as he arrived in Shanghai, which is a symbolic detail in itself. Similarly, in the works of the New Sensation School, class consciousness is sometimes combined with the "flower of evil" in Shanghai urban culture, such as the detailed description of the contrast between the rich and the poor in Mu Shiying's Foxtrot Dance in Shanghai and Five People in a Nightclub.

Shanghai literature:

Contradictory midnight

The details and places (such as funeral and dance, spy war of social butterfly, privacy of wife's living room, war in the exchange, luxurious private rooms in hotels, revelry on Riva River and various pornographic descriptions) described in Midnight in Shanghai reflect the typical prosperous and decadent structure. Mao Dun replaced the wandering intellectuals with the capitalists studying in Germany and the old prostitutes with the socialites among the rich. The erotic stories in this period, whether psychological or scene, are far higher than ordinary Shanghai novels. Just to highlight the critical position of the left wing, the screenwriter deliberately arranged chapters on the workers' strike struggle and the struggle between the two lines in the production party, regardless of his unfamiliarity with workers' lives, but it was not successful in this respect. Therefore, in essence, Midnight is just a Shanghai novel that reveals modern urban culture from the left-wing standpoint.

Liu Naou's attitude towards life in the creation of Urban Landscape comes down to simplicity and thoroughness. He linked this simplicity and thoroughness with the artificial culture of modern cities and formed a unique semi-colonial Shanghai landscape, which can be said to be the most vivid portrayal of Shanghai literature represented by Liu Naou.

Zhang Ailing's Love in the Whole City

The 1930s was the era when the neo-sensationalism and the left-wing culture pushed the two traditions of Shanghai-style literature to the peak. As a result, the Shanghai novels in the 1940s became mature and perfect under the pressure of humiliation.

Because Shanghai is an open city where Chinese and Western cultures collide constantly, and because the new literature since the May 4th Movement is basically a Europeanized tradition, the protagonists of Shanghai-style novels are mainly the bourgeoisie, intellectuals and their consumption circles closely related to the "West", while ordinary citizens only appear in Shanghai-style novels as negative bourgeois images. Zhang Ailing was a female writer who was very popular in the 1940s and was deeply educated by the May 4th New Literature. But at the beginning of her writing, she consciously got rid of the westernization of new literature and sought her own development possibility in traditional folk literature.

As an immigrant city, many cultural phenomena in Shanghai are gradually formed with immigrant culture. It has no ready-made cultural tradition, but is a mixture of various broken local folk cultures. Compared with rural folk culture, it does not appear in a complete form, but is deeply hidden in the memories of various urban residents, forming a virtual cultural memory, so urban folk customs must be personal and fragmented. Zhang Ailing was the first to pick up this broken personal family memory, and wrote Shanghai-style works such as The Golden Lock and Love in the Fallen City. Because Zhang Ailing has always been vaguely afraid of the coming of modernity, the metaphor of "eat, drink and be merry at the end of the century" and the decline of ancient families runs through all her personal memories. On the one hand, it is the crazy pursuit of material desires, on the other hand, it is the fleeting fear of pleasure. It is the heartfelt pain of urban residents in enemy-occupied areas who indulge in "good flowers don't bloom often", which is deeply manifested by Zhang Ailing on the spiritual level. Zhang Ailing is neither intoxicated nor critical of decadent urban modernity. She transcended and dispelled the traditions of the two Shanghai schools with the spirit of citizenship, and created the aesthetics of Shanghai novels with urban folk culture as the main body.