| In the beginning years of the Republic of China, with the rising of the metropolitan Shanghai and the class of townspeople, there appeared an unprecedented flourish of the townspeople literary journals. Saturday is a weekly that is both representative of and peculiar to the numerous townspeople literary journals of the time. Owing to its far-reaching influence and striking representativeness, "The Saturday school" has been a substitute for townspeople literature of the early period in the Republic of China, a category as important as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school. Since the first and second hundred issues of the journal appeared before and after the May Fourth Movement respectively, Saturday, to some extent, displays the changing process of the townspeople literature of that time. Therefore, Saturday is an important text that cannot be ignored by those who either investigate the overall picture of the townspeople literature around the May Fourth Movement or explore its changing contrail.However, Saturday has long been scorned and discriminated against. Ever since the appearance of the New Literature, the early Republic literature, with Saturday as its representative, has been viewed as a counter current and thereby attacked and suppressed. Things began to change in the 1980s. Some researchers started to take a new perspective of the early Republic literature. They consider the Saturday school significant for its transitional role in a key period of Chinese literature development. Researchers abroad show more enthusiasm in the study of the literature around the founding of the Republic and offer higher appraisal of it. Some of them have pointed out that literature around the founding of the Republic is not only a period that transits to* the modern times but also "a modem period that has been suppressed".To give an appropriate comment on Saturday, through a deep and detailed exploration of its historical contexts, its writers, and its texts, this paper intends to make a literary phenomenological study of Saturday by suspending various comments already made.This paper consists mainly of four parts:Part One deals with Saturday's founding backgrounds. The appearance of Saturdayis inseparable with the rise of Shanghai, the modem metropolis. However, that city has experienced an uneven development in its early days. Ever since its opening to commerce, Shanghai, a city once called ""Little Suzhow", has taken the place of Suzhou and become the economic center of Jiangnan. Culturally, however, Shanghai progressed much slower. Thus, culturally speaking, Shanghai remained a traditional society until the early years of the Republic.Part Two is concerned with Saturday's writing subjects. The important writers of Saturday are mainly professional writers who earn a living by writing in Shanghai. Most of them come from Jiangzhe, especially from Suzhou. These writers do not identify with Shanghai spiritually and never become true "Shanghainese". They display their civic characteristics such as diligence, practicality and profit-seeking while pursuing a leisurely and romantic life style of the scholar-bureaucratic. Having not integrated into the townspeople society, they do not possess the mundane mentality. To some extent, they can be regarded as traditional literati with new identity, new roles and new means of living.Part Three is about the cultural features of Saturday. Fiction in Saturday put much emphasis on the romance of stories, but writers for Saturday have not displayed the characteristics of the metropolis桽hanghai. Nor have they revealed the true-to-life urban life. Fiction in Saturday shows the characteristic of classic "philistine romance". Meanwhile, writers for Saturday have not transcended the mentality and value system of traditional literati although they 07 to reflect the new spirits of their time. They cannot be regarded as betrayers of the old tradition. Neither are they able to accept radical social changes. Thereby, it is hard for fiction in Saturday to transcend the moder...
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