Analyzing the awakening of female consciousness in Love in a Fallen City—Framed in the social context of Shanghai during the May Fourth period

Abstract

Shanghai has always been a city of legends. In the mid-twentieth century, the establishment of the Concession in Shanghai led to the city's active or passive acceptance of the impacts and changes brought by foreign cultures in its social life and ideological and cultural aspects. Against this background, a group of pioneering women began to abandon the constraints imposed on women by feudal ethics, and women's self-awareness and sense of independence began to awaken. This paper takes Shanghai in the May 4th period as the social background framework, and takes Zhang Eileen's middle grade novel Love in a Fallen City as an example, and adopts the research method of textual analysis to focus on the specific content of the text in order to analyse and explore the trend of women's awakening of their consciousness under the impact of traditional Chinese feudalism in the May 4th period.