Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School:

The school of modern Chinese novels, which began at the beginning of the 20th century and flourished after the Xinhai Revolution, is named after the poem "36 mandarin ducks and a pair of butterflies" in the Qing dynasty's novel "Traces of the Moon and Flowers". It was also known as the "Saturday School" because it was the most influential of the butterfly publications.

The content of this school was mostly written about the love of talented men and women, and the main writers were Bao Tianxiao, Xu Xiaoya, Zhou Shoujuan, Li Hanqiu, and Li Tingyi. The main publications include "Saturday", "Novel Times" and "Eyebrows".

A genre of popular literature that inherited the tradition of ancient Chinese novels emerged during the construction of the metropolis in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period. This genre has not been recognized by the new literary circles, there is a very complex historical background: the trend of the times, the evolution of the concept of literature, the readers' mentality of mutation and other reasons, coupled with its own inherent defects, are determined to go through a period of suppression of the course.

The controversy between this school and the "new school" of literature is, in essence, between "popular" literature and "serious" literature, between "popular" literature and "serious" literature, between "popular" literature and "serious" literature, between "popular" literature and "serious" literature, and between "popular" literature and "serious" literature. The debate between the "new school" and the "popular" literature is, in essence, a product of the contradictions between "popular" literature and "serious" literature, between "common" literature and "revolutionary" literature. One of the representative writers of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School, Bao Tianxiao, once talked about his aim of creation as "advocating a new political system and conserving old morals".

These ten words represent in a very condensed and general way the ideological reality of most of the authors of this school. This is contrary to the new literary movement that emerged before and after the May Fourth Movement, which strongly advocated science and anti-feudalism.

In terms of form, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School was characterized by long novels in chapters and long novels, and the most readable short stories were the legends, which were the ancient vernacular novels that they still inherited. The New Literature School, on the other hand, abandoned the chapter book genre in its infancy and focused on the innovation of the short story.

In this way, when the May Fourth Revolution opened the prelude to the new democratic revolution, in the eyes of the new literary camp, they were still "dragging an invisible braid of old democracy", and some of their traditional consciousness in their works was bound to form a pair of contradictions with the new literary camp. The new literature camp is a contradiction in terms.

Because of the parting of the ways in content and form, it was inevitable that the new literary circles before and after the May Fourth Movement would take the initiative against this school, which was both a historical necessity and a necessity for innovation. In the face of the process of historical development, we can fully understand the necessity and inevitability of this criticism.