Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.3, 2019

Exemplar, Reader’s Taste and Vernacular Essay of “May Fourth”—On the Avant-garde Value of Midnight

(Abstract)

Xu Zhongjia

Midnight is highly praised for its depicting the social relations and class structures of Chinese society in materialistic dialectics in the period of the League of Left-wing Writers. It embodies the aesthetic success of left-wing literature which makes it different from May Fourth new literature. On the other hand, Midnight also pointed the fault of the League of Left-wing Writers as proletarian mass literature’s distancing from reality. Midnight made a successful exemplar of Wu Sunfu which achieved the dialectical unification of common and particular which the League of Left-wing Writers failed to do. The proletarian mass literature took workers and soldiers as its ideal audiences while Midnight catered for the taste of city readers. Proletarian mass literature adored the proletarian mandarin language, which Midnight developed from the tradition of May Fourth vernacular language. This is both the inheritance of May Fourth new cultural tradition and creative transformation between two periods.