"fiction Illustrated" To "weeks" - "may Fourth Period Of Popular Fiction

Taking periodical forms, theme types and narrative styles as standards, this essay tries to outline and analyze the development and characteristics of Chinese popular fictions during the period of May 4th Movement by the studies on the two prevailing periodicals for popular fictions, namely "The illustrational magazine of novel" (Monthly, 1917.1-1919.4) and "The Sunday" (Weekly, 1922.3-1923.3).The chief editor of both periodicals is the famous writer Bao Tianxiao who is well known as "King of popular fictions". The main authors who wrote for one periodical also worked for the other. Famous writers during the period of the May 4th Movement such as Xu Zhuodai, Zhou Yihan, Fan Yanqiao and Yao Yuanchu provided a lot of nice pieces for both periodicals. Therefore, it will be helpful for us to focus on these periodicals as the point of contact in order to have a concrete and detailed investigation of the development of the popular fictions in those days, thus casting off the commonly accepted severe study pattern in which the revolution of New Literature after May 4th, 1919 is regarded as the dividing line between Modern Literature and Contemporary Literature.In the analysis of the forms of these popular periodicals, we are surprised at the highly commercialized processes and modernization. It can be possibly concluded that it is just the market-profiting mode established bythe popular periodicals that helped the New Literature after May 4th, 1919 take deep roots and develop into its prosperity.Love and marriage is one of the inevitable choices for writers either in New Literature or popular fictions. Among these works, popular fictions' characteristics of being a mixture of new and old, countrified and foreign styles are revealed in a focalized way. "Ideal Fictions" are already abnormal in popular literature during the period of the May 4th Movement. But it is by reading between these fantastic and comical lines that we find the masses' most realistic imagination of "China in future" at that time.From the point of view of narrative patterns, we will get to know the great efforts made by the popular writers for the realization of modern forms of Chinese Fictions. The arduous leap over sticking to the traditional "talkshow" pattern and confirming the fabrication of narration itself might have witnessed the way of revolution leading to the same goal as that of the May 4th Movement by different routes for the contemporary literature.