What are the achievements and contributions of Midnight?

China's novels have been deeply influenced and infiltrated by the tradition of "historical biography" and "poetic coquettish". Mao Dun's Midnight is still in the framework of the interaction between these two traditions. On the one hand, Mao Dun provided a vivid historical picture for the ideological view of history, profoundly explained the reality of domestic economic struggle and class struggle in the 1930s, and reached a historical conclusion in line with proletarian ideology. On the other hand, Mao Dun has not forgotten the role of "poetry". He weaves personal and emotional historical experience into the shaping of specific characters, and puts humanistic reflection and humanitarian criticism in his works. Epic realism creation has a larger scale and momentum, reflecting a broader and more complex social outlook in a historical period, and thus can better express the essential characteristics of this era.

Since Midnight, most of the large-scale works describing social phenomena in China have formed a fairly stable creative mode. A group of writers began to recognize and try this creative mode. They are very concerned about social reality and actively describe the main social contradictions, so people call them social analysis novels. After 1930s, this tradition of realistic novels initiated by Mao Dun gradually rose to the mainstream and reached its peak in 1950s and 1960s.

Midnight is the most outstanding artistic achievement. It showed the contradictions and struggles of all classes in China society in the early 1930s with amazing artistic power, and put forward and answered the most important social problems of that year. It can be said that Midnight is the first successful novel in the proletarian literature movement in China, which is of epoch-making significance. This is the author's great contribution to the history of modern literature in China.