Study On The School Of Yusi From The Historical And Aesthetic Perspective

Yusi is in modern China the first journal on prose in Chinese style, which paves the first way for the production of prose and critical literature in modern China. The School of Yusi is a prominent school in the modern and contemporary history of literature, and it is represented by such a group of famous writers and great masters as Lu Xun(Zhou Zuo-ren), Zhou zuo-ren(Lu Xun's brother), Lin Yutang etc. It features in the production of Chinese prose, which has a further influence upon the ideology, culture and the cause of revolution in modern China. So far, the study concerned has borne abundant fruits, but still some questions are left unsolved. This paper gives an overall review of the school in the development of Chinese modern and contemporary literature, analyses it by means of similar critical ways and assessment standard with the historical and aesthetic viewpoint proposed by Angels, and digs up something concealed and even mis-read by the academe.The geneses and framework have been given in the introduction part. The body of this paper is in two sections. The first section analyses the cultural visage from the perspective of history study. In a historical viewpoint, the School of Yusi was born and prospered driven by and under the influence of the May Fourth Movement, so it is a literature school which inherited the spirit of this movement in an all-round way. Inspired by the spirit of enlightenment of the movement, they shouldered consciously the most important historical responsibility in ideology to develop the social and civilization criticism far and wide, and they set up successfully a civilian-oriented cultural standpoint under the further influence of the sense of civilian put forward first by the movement, and they regarded the liberalism spirit of the movement as the core of modern intellectuals with an image of independent and moral integrity, so they are virtually the son of the spirit of the movement.The second section analyses by means of text analysis the masters' aesthetic reproduction of the unique style of Yusi, and this part probes into the aesthetic and literature values of what the School of Yusi achieved, from such three aspects as the aesthetic idiosyncrasy, the inside-and-outside generative mechanism, diversified pattern and inauguratory significances. The conclusive part sums up the historical significances of the School of Yusi.