| Shen Newpaper is storage of full and accurate historical data of contemporary China. As the supplement with longest existence to Shen Newspaper, Free Talking played an important role in Modern Chinese Literary History. As first-hand raw data, it gave reference to the study of literary converting in Modern Chinese. Free Talking was first published on August 24th 1911, and ended up on April 24th 1949. During its 38-year existence, Zhou Shoujuan had held the post of chief editor for 12 years. With painstaking working and rich editing experiences, Zhou Shoujuan made Free Talking became one of the most influential newspaper supplements in the 1920s. In departed literary history works, the creation group around the chief editor-Zhou Shoujuan was deemed to be the member of Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School. But during the studying of actual literatures, we discovered that it was just an incompact literary group gathered around a certain publication. The establishment of modern remuneration system rendered them the independence against political power. Some of them wrote for livings; some of them edited publications; some devoted to education industry. But all of them pursued the life with beauty and elegancy, and considered themselves to be celebrities with literary reputation. The literary group established by them had no definite tenets and rigorous disciplines. But in the group activities, them shared close values, and completed own identity modeling by selective describing group activities. The contents and commercials in Free Talking revealed the information about its reader group. They were not rabbles or urban petty bourgeois, but middle class with certain incomes and education backgrounds.The novels published in Free Talking had rich contents, and covered every aspect of life in Republic of China period. Some novels introspected new Love & Marriage relationships and family problems, while some exposed social evils and described people's misery. The authors'contradictory creating thought is noticeable, that they accept new ideas and can't get rid of old morals. The descriptions of Shanghai in these novels were also meaningful. On one side, they described Shanghai as a prosperous and rich modern city; on the other side, the anxiety and uneasy raised for all kinds of social problems in urbanization progress were obviously showed in their novels. The stylistic feature of novels in Free Talking formed by inheriting the skills of creating characters and traditional narrating model from the classic Chinese novels, and had some new transforms because of the influence of western novels and novel theories. Though on the whole, in respect to researching and experimenting new novel skills, Free Talking was not as conscious and pioneering as litterateurs in May Fourth period. |
