Zhang Ailing's writing was a leading branch of the May-4th trend of enlightening literature, which has long been neglected. With her miserable stories, Zhang interpreted her approval of ideas of common Chinese people. Most heroes and heroines in her stories were outsiders to traditional culture of the Chinese group, with which she attempted to comfort her lonely and bitter soul in those value-abnormalized days with physical stories in modern cities. As a result, her love stories mostly ended with micro-reunion broken under the culture of macro-reunion. Moreover, the narrative structure of her novels presented a peculiar poetics of modern time.

Zhang Ailing; a history of the 20th-century novels; a history of literary conceptions; poetics of time