Forties Citizen Fiction Value Reconstruction

Taking modern citizens as the descriptive objects, this essay develops a concept of modern citizen novels focusing on modern citizen-oriented values, mirrors and holds definitely that, as far as the referent criterion is concerned, novels based on modern citizen-oriented values belong to modern citizen ones, and limits the scope for study by exploring mainly Shanghai novels composed during 1930s and 1940s.By means of combining the study target of Shanghai novels, the perspective of modern citizens and their core values into an creative body, it reconstructs the literature values of Shanghai novels composed during 1930s and 1940s from three perspectives of content structure, formal creation and aesthetic style.The article is made up of several chapters: at the very beginning, the introduction defines and confines the concept of Shanghai citizen novels composed during 1930s and 1940s; the first chapter primarily analyses the material circumstances of Shanghai modern citizen novels, and intends to examine the economic conditions and urban space for the public, citizens daily life and the media for the purpose of producing an originally social background in the birth of 1930s-1940s Shanghai modern citizen novels; The second chapter is the theoretic base of the whole essay, limiting the modern citizen-oriented values by emphasizing material rationality, life and humanism as the core ones, considers the modern citizens as the descriptive object, and thus points out that novels symbolizing modern citizen-oriented values are the study objects. Meanwhile, this chapter also combs its longitudinal literature history, attempting to mirror its inborn literature backgrounds. The third chapter analyses different kinds of citizen imagination which is influenced by modern citizen-oriented values from the perspective of content structure. In order to be brief in narration, the article concludes different sorts of literature imagination by examining equally Shanghai citizens from the angles of the top-down, the bottom-up and the horizontal streets, which reflects honestly modern citizen-oriented values while indicating dissimilar images. The fourth chapter, exploring the latest form change and the impact of modern citizen-oriented values, analyses the new narrative tactics of 1930s-1940s Shanghai modern citizen novels concentrating on material rhetoric, mainly including the spatial rhetorical and material-preferred contents. The fifth chapter analyses the female style and its literary unavoidability while the sixth one compares 1930s-1940s Shanghai modern citizen novels with various contemporary novel schools on the macro-horizon so as to establish their literary independence, and from the elegant and the popular perspectives, unfolds the co-existence of elegance and popularity in the aesthetic orientation of citizen novels; and by comparing urban and rural values, reveals that contemporary novels ought to employ a new type of modern citizen-oriented value as the criterion, which helps contribute to effectively advancing the development of contemporary novels.