The Twentieth Century, Citizen Fiction Outline

This thesis discusses the form and changes of Chinese citizen novel in 20^th century. Citizen literature is the literary express of citizen culture. Citizen culture embodies the value sense and the behavior pattern of citizen. Because of the protracted nature and the stability of Chinese feudal culture, the Chinese city culture is long in the shadow of rural culture. Chinese citizen culture in 20^th century is very feeble in the squeeze between Chinese rural culture and west colonial culture. In this case, the main ideology pays no attention to citizen novel. But citizen culture changes with the history course of 20^th century. Modern city is prosperous and citizen culture is flourishing. Citizen novel related to city and citizen culture is growing with great efforts as well. This thesis tries to make clear the clue of citizen novel in 20^th century in the way of finding how the citizen culture affects citizen novel. By the way of studying the representative schools, writers and texts of citizen novel in 20^th century, the thesis makes great efforts to reveal the course of the Chinese citizen culture and citizen novel breaking away from the rural culture and heading for city civilization.This article is divided into 5 chapters.The first chapter gives definitions to several concepts about citizen novel in 20^th century. By observing and studying the change of the concepts of citizen, civil society, citizen culture and citizen literature, this article define citizen novel as a kind of novel that reflect the life and the value sense as well as the preference of lower strata citizen. The article also discusses the relation and the distinction among urban novel, popular novel and citizen novel, analyses the relationship between citizen novel in popular literature and citizen novel in pure literature.By observing the change of the Chinese citizen novel in 20^th century, the first chapter finds that when ZHANG Ziping, LAO She and ZHANG Henshui write their representative works in the late 1920s, citizen novel embodies new distinguishing feature and gets into its mature period. Novels that mainly express traditional citizen ideas represented by LAO She and novels that mainly express modern ideas represented by ZHANG Ailing are two basic kinds of citizen novels in 20^th century in Chinese. The...