10 Lectures on Keywords of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Author: Chen Sihe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-10-01
Features: From the outbreak of the War of Resistance——to 1949——to the "Cultural Revolution," these four decades were a special phase in the modern culture of China. The factors of war were deeply embedded in people's consciousness, influencing their modes of thinking and ways of thinking. Especially when people who had been through the smoke of war engaged in peaceful construction, traces of the war era still remained in their cultural psychology: a peculiar combination of pragmatic rationality and fervent irrationality, the heightening of nationalist sentiments, an instinctive rejection of foreign cultures, and the intoxication with military life following the victory in the war, viewing the wartime military lifestyle as a perfect ideal realm, and so on. All these can be broadly summarized as "wartime cultural psychology." This mentality could not be fundamentally changed in a considerable period of time after the war.