On Zhu Shouju

The present paper takes Zhu Shouju as its object of study. Though Zhu Shouju wasfamous as a writer of popular literature, his life story is not familiar to even the literarycircle. Based on the materials that are available, the author of the paper has conducteddetailed investigations and researches in order to get a thorough knowledge about both hislife and his literary creation. The paper focuses mainly on his definition of the muckrakingnovel, its characteristics and criticism as well as its social and cultural significance andartistic features. Zhu Shouju’s works concentrate on the metropolis Shanghai during thetransforming period, depicting the enormous impact exerted by the commercial civilizationon the traditional society and the deformed humanities under the impact. The writerexposed such humanities as greedy, hypocrisy, ferocity and ugliness by depicting what theall segments of the society did in a lifelike way, so he came to the conclusion sadly that themoral degeneration of the society was getting worse day by day and human hearts were notwhat they had been in the old days. On the other hand, however, he demonstrated themodernity in his works unconsciously and identifies with it as he condemned severelyvarious shady aspects of the city. To put it in a concrete way, his muckraking novelspresent to readers various tricks of cheating and being cheated from four characters’ imagepedigree in a way close to taking pictures, which is of great value for us to catch a glimpseinto the citizen society. Moreover, he was also a filmmaker who had made greatcontributions to the development of Chinese films.The paper consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, the author introduces ZhuShouju from several aspects, including his life story, his literary creation and a briefanalysis on his works except his full-length novels. In the second chapter, the author paysclose attention to the definition and characteristics of his muckraking novels. The author ofthe paper tries to define this kind of novels exactly and make comments on the featuresembodied in his muckraking novels. The third chapter is mainly about the social andcultural significance and artistic features of his full-length novels. The author analyzes, on the basis of interpreting texts, the character pedigree, the story model, the narrativeperspective and narrative attitude, the structure of the novels, the language style and so on.