Zhou Zuoren's Black-top Boat

Flowers, plants, insects and fish, drinking tea and wine, talking about heaven and earth, and trivial matters of life are the consistent subjects of Zhou Zuoren's prose writing after the May Fourth Incident. The long rhythm and the pursuit of traditional scholarly elegance, fun and leisure are the prose styles Zhou Zuoren has always pursued after the May Fourth Incident. As a representative writer of Chinese modernism, "The Black-topped Boat" embodies his simple, friendly, calm and light-hearted prose style. In the form of an epistle, the work selects the ordinary life scenes in the water towns of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and adopts the descriptive method and order of contrast and static writing, introducing and describing his hometown crow's nest boat, as well as people and things related to the crow's nest boat. The whole piece is full of talk, but it is not branched and not spread out, and it is all in one, which gives people a kind of elegant, simple and natural sense of aesthetics.