Features Of Townspeople Literature In Zhang Henshui's Novels

Henshui Zhang is a well-known novelist in the early 20th century, and there are various kinds of opinions concerning the positioning of his works. Some maintain that he belongs to the school of "Mandarin duck and butterfly" with the aim of presenting the love stories of the bel-esprits and the beauties and thus they should not be accepted. Still others maintain that he belongs to the school of "The Saturday". This paper attempts to prove that these classifications are too mechanical and the reason why Zhang's novels can stand the test of time and are long loved by the readers is that he cannot be put into a specific school for the complexity of his living environment and the diversity of his life experience determines the varieties of his novels. Among all the topics, his attention on the townspeople is very eyecatching. Zhang cherishes great love for the townspeople and he shows very little attention to the politics. All these together can explain his townspeople literature. This paper mainly consists of two chapters: the first chapter discusses the personal and social foundations of Zhang's creation of his townspeople literature and the second chapter focuses on the concerning problems of his townspeople literature with his three novels Legend in Peking, Family of Gold and Rouge and To Laugh and Cry Because of Fate as the basis and with the form and content of his novels as the two perspectives. The first chapter discusses the personal and social foundations of the formation of Zhang's townspeople novels. Zhang had rich life experiences: he was born in the family of officials of Qing Dynasty, and this enables him to see more clearly the nature of the feudal society and prepared him well to expose the dark sides of the social life in old China. Zhang read widely and had a memory better than most of his contemporaries or in other words, he himself was a bel-esprit. His wide reading makes him inherit the spirit of being loyal to the king and loving one's country handed down by those scholar-bureaucrats. His love for love stories and martial stories widens his view and all these will directly influence his later writings. Zhang experienced many marriages including arranged one, marriage of convenience and certainly marriage out love. All these marriages undoubtedly have some effect on his literary creation, especially his topic of love stories between bel-esprits and beauties. Zhang's creation and publication of his works was closely connected with the publishing industry. Most of his works were published in the form of serials on newspapers and he himself for most of the time worked as an editor for various newspaper and he even started his own newspaper. The practical concerns of the circulation of the newspaper and the amount of readers who could buy his newspaper or namely business profit certainly left its mark on his writings.Zhang is an intellectual with double personalities. On the one hand, he was very much influenced by the traditional way of thinking and the traditional values and ideas and on the other hand he accepted new ideas from the May 4th Movement. This tense between his different personalities often appears in his novels.Literary creation cannot be performed out of the social conditions of its time and Zhang is no exception. Zhang's family and the social environment he was in definitely shed great influence on his novel writing. Zhang belongs to the citizen class and this will also make his writing different form that of other writers. He expressed the happiness and grieves, the aspirations and tastes of the citizen class and it is also because of this fact that this paper asserts that his writing belongs to the townspeople literature.The second chapter of this paper discusses in detail the forms and contents of Zhang's novels with his three representative novels Legend in Peking, Family of Gold and Rouge and To Laugh and Cry Because of Fate as the basis and with the form and content of his novels as the two perspectives.The elegance and vulgarity of literary works...