The Morning Of Shanghai: In The Context Of Industrial Novel

Zhou Er'fu's The Morning of Shanghai is an important work created during the "seventeen-year" period. Zhou Er'fu, the author of this work, realistically depicted the everyday life of Shanghai's various classes during that period with his epic style, which offers us essential clues to understand the politic, economic, social and everyday life changes at that time. Since its publication, this novel has caused a lot of discussions and turmoil, which cast a dramatic fate on the novel and its author. Furthermore, it also has been made into TV serials in 90s. However, no one has devoted to a systematic research of this important work, with the current research focus solely on its characters and with its conclusion quite cliche.Thus, this paper tries to analyze The Morning of Shanghai with a new perspective. I try to use the concept of Industrial novel as an entering point, discussing several themes, such as the industrialism, the imagination of New China, the re-imagination of the space and the changes of various classes etc, embodied in the work. Furthermore, because The Morning of Shanghai is abound with a lot of critic discourses since its creation, so the research of it necessarily entails the analysis of the discourses around it. This paper tries to make clear these discourses, showing that how a changing social context alters the evaluation of the same work.