Zhang Ai - Ling's Novels

Rising to prominence in 1940s as a writer of Isolated Island Literary Circles, Zhang Ailing touched upon predicament of personal life with her sensitive soul and fine pen. She expressed her pessimism and disappointment about life by way of exposing the desolate, dark world and various kinds of blue life in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society. In the matter of subject, she steered away from sensitive reality and political field, technically created a profound and illusory artistic mood. In this way, she illustrated her tragic experience about life so as to further run after the profound interest, and touched the instinct existence of life in that unusual age.It' s Zhang Ailing who opened a new and popularizing road to modern metropolis for Chinese modern literature. She held that since May Fourth Movement, new cultural tradition had become an inalienable part of our national culture and penetrated the blood of our nation, bearing no treason. The bloodline of this culture can be reflected in western education that she received, profound experience that she held on human tragedy, and satirical but sympathetic attitudes thatshe had towards vicissitudes of life of insignificant people in such a great era. Zhang Ai ling' s contribution to the city novels in 1943 completely changed the situation of May Fourth literature being separated from people in big cities. She successfully combined the fictitious folk scenes, such as degenerated feudal families, degraded noble women, the daily life of dishonest faceless citizens with the focus of traditional writers of new culture on human nature and her accurate understandings of morality in transitional periods, embodied the cultural cream of modern cities.This essay illustrates Zhang Ai ling' s novel creation mainly in the following five aspects: the formation of life experience and her individual character; the abnormal human nature; the metropolitan form of Shanghai and Hang Rang ; thetraditional and modern aggregate; the concludingrichdesolation and powerless solitary.