Since the time around late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic, China was influenced severely by Western Cultures in many aspects from daily commodities to cultural ideologies, thus the Chinese society at that time changed enormously under such impacts, even faster and huger than what so ever happened in other eras in ancient Chinese history.
General speaking, the relations among languages, literatures and the social cultures are inevitably entangled so close when novelists project or reflect what they see, feel and think within their personal social encounters, transforming into their novels through the words. Therefore, it comes obviously three perspectives for a work to re-examine: language, content, and context. This subject of this study focuses on Shanghai School Literature from 1912 to 1949, including 3 periods of time segment: 1912 to 1925, 1925 to 1937, and 1937 to 1949.
By using Teun A. van Dijk’s concept of “Macrostructure” and his theory on Discourse to analyze the aforementioned novels as the texts, the attempt of this thesis is to explicate the connectivity of these three factors in Hai-School Novels during these three periods, so as to reveal the vivid faces of society hidden in those works mirroring social movements struggled with the process of traditions versus modernizations under the cultural conflicts between China and the West.