The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature

Kirk A. Denton, Kirk Denton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231541145
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meaning of Sinophone literature, and the role of different media in the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and the schools with which they were aligned, featuring key names, titles, and terms in English and in Chinese characters. Woven throughout are pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature. The volume includes essays on such authors as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Jin Yong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Gao Xingjian, and Yan Lianke. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.

PART I

Thematic Essays

1

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

KIRK A. DENTON

The question of the origins of modern Chinese literature is very much intertwined with politics and politicized definitions of modernity. The conventional view, initially promoted by May Fourth movement literary critics and later propagated by their Marxist inheritors before and after the 1949 revolution, is that modern Chinese literature erupted suddenly in 1918 with the publication of Lu Xun’s 鲁迅 short story “Diary of a Madman” (see “The Madman That Was Ah Q”). The “birth” of this socially and culturally engaged literature was portrayed as an origin leading to the revolutionary literature of the late 1920s and 1930s and the establishment of a class-based literature in Yan’an, the Communist base during the war against Japan, which in turn became the model for literature in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since the early 1980s, however, literary historians in China have assailed this canonical May Fourth/Maoist view of the origin of modern Chinese literature and consciously sought to “rewrite literary history” (重写文学史) (see “Modern Chinese Literature as an Institution”), a project that has restored many writers excluded or marginalized from the Maoist canon and has created a far more diverse and heterogeneous picture of literary development. Chinese and Western critics have questioned the narrative of May Fourth as origin and its faith in “enlightenment” and have looked to “alternative modernities” repressed by its hegemonic voice, including late Qing fiction (D. Wang 1997), popular Butterfly fiction (Chow 1991:34–83), and modernism.

Although any periodization of literary history will whitewash tensions, complexities, and ambiguities, delineating distinct periods is still a useful framework for making sense of the past and understanding how and why literature evolves and changes. At the same time, we should recognize that the very structure one uses to divide literature into periods—and, for that matter, into schools and styles—is never empty of political and ideological motive (see “Modern Chinese Literature as an Institution”). In what follows, I sketch a history of modern Chinese literature that draws from conventional PRC representations while at the same time focusing attention on and questioning the politics of that representation.

LATE QING: IMAGINING THE NATION (1895–1911)

Two important and intertwined forces shaped the history of nineteenth-century China: imperialism and internal social disintegration. To a great degree, though of course by no means absolutely, these forces determined the nature of literary production in the late Qing and through the rest of the twentieth century. As the sovereignty of their country was increasingly threatened by Western and Japanese imperialism, particularly economic imperialism, over the course of the nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals began to look for explanations for their country’s weakness relative to the global powers of the day. Initial responses—such as borrowing Western science and technology in order to increase Chinese “wealth and power”—were grounded in a faith that Western materiality would not destroy the essence of Chinese spiritual and cultural values. With the humiliating defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), however, intellectuals began to extend this reflection to the sacrosanct realm of ideas and culture. Was there something inherent in Chinese culture, they asked, that inhibited national strength and prevented China from acting on equal terms with other nations?

For the most part, late Qing intellectuals questioned aspects of tradition from within a traditional set of assumptions; their goal was not to destroy tradition but to invigorate it by stripping it of its negative aspects and renewing it with an infusion of Western ideas. The effect of their labors, however, was often to make tradition appear even less relevant. A good example of someone who sought this revamping of tradition is Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858–1927), whose reinterpretations of Confucian texts transformed Confucius from someone who looked back nostalgically on a lost golden age to a forward-looking, progressive reformer, a transformation that could not have occurred without the influence of Darwinian, evolutionary thought. Tan Sitong 谭嗣同 (1865–1898), another late Qing reformer, sought to place “benevolence” (仁) at the core of the Confucian value system by attacking the ethics of li (礼, the prescriptive ethical guidelines for human relations).

Central to the dissemination of Western thought in China was, of course, translation. Two translators, Lin Shu 林纾 (1852–1924) and Yan Fu 严复 (1854–1921), stand far above the rest. Yan Fu translated a host of Western works of sociology, economics, and philosophy, including Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and most influential of all, Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics. As these works were read and discussed by intellectuals in the crisis atmosphere of the late Qing, their ideas were appropriated and shaped into a Chinese discourse of modernity centered on such concepts as evolution, progress, individualism, liberty, law, nation, and national character. Lin Shu’s translations of more than two hundred, mostly Western European, novels were extremely popular in intellectual circles. They seemed to give narrative form to aspects of this discourse of modernity, presenting tales of individualist heroes, for example, and to offer a new, more politically engaged role for fiction in nation building (Hill 2013).

The spread of this discourse of modernity could not have occurred without the rise of a commercial print culture, which blossomed especially after 1905 when the civil service examination system was abolished and intellectuals were forced to search for new careers. Western-style newspapers, literary journals and literary supplements to newspapers, popular magazines, women’s magazines, and the like became national forums for the shaping and dissemination of this discourse of modernity. Key to this new print culture was the figure of Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873–1929), who founded and edited many newspapers and journals and contributed his own very influential writings to them. These writings introduced to a national Chinese readership knowledge of the West, critiqued aspects of the Chinese tradition and the national psychology it instilled, and promoted political, social, and literary reform. Although professional writers had certainly existed in earlier times (for example, Li Yu 李渔 [1610–1680]), their broad-scale emergence as a class occurred during the late Qing. Writers could potentially live off the proceeds of their writing, though in reality this was seldom the case and most relied on more steady incomes from teaching or jobs as editors in publishing houses.

Interconnected with these events in the intellectual and print spheres were important developments in literature. Even within the dominant Tongcheng 桐城 and Wenxuan 文选 schools, which advocated traditional styles of classical prose, important changes were occurring. The Tongcheng school of prose, of which the translators Yan Fu and Lin Shu were a part, sought to revive traditional values through a restoration of “ancient-style prose” (古文) modeled on the prose masters of the Tang and Song dynasties. When Lin Shu translated Western novels into Chinese, he did so not in the vernacular but in ancient style. He did this to make the Western novel respectable to his literati peers, but also because he wanted to reinvigorate the ancient style with the dynamism that the Western novel seemed to offer. Ultimately, readers were far more interested in the exotic content of the novels than the prose style into which they were translated (Huters 1987, 1988). Moreover, as Michael Hill (2013) argues, Lin Shu’s prose incorporates many modern lexical terms and in that sense is not nearly as purely “ancient” as it is often made out to be. The Wenxuan school promoted a highly ornate parallel prose as the embodiment of an indigenous national culture and as a revolutionary stance against the Qing, a foreign dynasty. Outside these traditional literary schools, more profound changes were taking place. A “poetry revolution” (诗界革命) led by Liang Qichao and Huang Zunxian 黄遵宪 proposed reinvigorating classical poetry by incorporating Western terms, folk motifs, vernacular language, and new themes. In prose, Liang was instrumental in developing a style called “new style prose” (新文体), a blend of classical syntax, vernacular language, and foreign loanwords, that would exert an important influence on the formation of a modern vernacular language in the May Fourth period.

Liang Qichao’s most influential contribution to literature was his promotion of fiction as an instrument of national reform (see “The Uses of Fiction”). With its particular power of immersing the reader in its world, Liang believed that fiction could “renovate” morality, politics, social customs, learning and arts, and the human mind itself (Denton 1996:74). In seeing fiction as a vehicle for moral and social transformation, Liang was both traditional and modern. His modernity lies in promoting fiction—traditionally a genre on the low end of the literary hierarchy—for the serious moral and political purposes conventionally ascribed to poetry and prose. Following Liang’s call for a new “political” novel was an unprecedented boom in fiction writing (see “Late Qing Fiction”). Thousands of novels in many styles and on a wide variety of themes were produced in the final decade of the Qing: sentimental love stories, detective novels, satires of corruption, science fiction, allegories about China, political novels (Yeh 2015), and so on. Strikingly different from the premodern novel in terms of its focus on contemporary society, these novels also bear some of the structural properties of their...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Major Historical Events
• Part One Thematic Essays
• Part Two Authors, Works, Schools
• Index