History of the Evolution of Literary Styles in China over the Last Century

Author: Feng Guanglian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-10-01
Features:
Introduction This book approaches the topic from a new academic perspective—body-style rheology, analyzing the structural types and linguistic forms of literary styles, and tracing the development process and evolutionary trajectory of five literary genres—novels, poems, etc.—over nearly a century. It summarizes the experiences and lessons learned from their inheritance and innovation. The book emphasizes the study of literary ontology, integrating value judgment with aesthetic orientation. Its macroscopic grasp and classification of various stages are particularly innovative.
Excerpt:
Introduction Novels have a long history in China. However, as a literary style that can stand shoulder to shoulder with poetry and prose in people's literary concepts, as a mainstream literature holding a pivotal position in the history of Chinese literature, and as a focal point for literary scholars due to its rich theoretical achievements and creative accomplishments, novels truly began to flourish only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Without a doubt, whether in terms of creative scale or overall quality, Chinese novels in the past century have far surpassed those of previous eras. Against the backdrop of the intense collision, exchange, and integration of Chinese and Western cultures and literatures in modern times, Chinese novel art has undergone earth-shaking changes. The history of novel development over the past century is the history of the transformation and evolution of Chinese novels from classical to modern forms, the history of Chinese modern novel art maturing from infancy and singularity to richness and diversity, and the history laying a solid foundation for the deeper development of Chinese novel art in the future. Of course, it is undoubtedly a historically valuable task to gain insight into the development of Chinese novels over this period, to trace the evolutionary trajectory of their body-styles, and to explore the underlying artistic laws. A specialized, dynamic historical study of the development of Chinese novel body-styles can be said to be a new attempt in the field of literary history research. In recent years, with the deepening of theoretical thinking and the enrichment of critical methods in our literary research circles, static theoretical research on novels as a unique literary form has achieved considerable results. A large number of research outcomes in areas such as novel aesthetics, novel morphology, novel structure, novel narratology, novel stylistics, and novel rhetoric have provided a theoretical foundation for studying the evolution of Chinese novel art from a literary history perspective, giving us confidence in the ability to trace the process of the evolution of Chinese novel body-styles over the past century. However, there is another side to the issue. Dynamic research is fundamentally different from static research. Faced with the ever-changing development path of Chinese novel art and the complex creative phenomena over the past century, researchers will face severe challenges in both their ways of thinking and research methods, as well as in theoretical explanations and specific descriptions. The primary issue to address is the theoretical definition of the novel "body-style." What is the novel body-style? What important theoretical questions are involved in understanding the meaning of the novel body-style? Previous novel theories have not provided us with many ready-made, ideal answers to these questions. This requires independent thinking. We believe that the term "novel body-style" refers, in simple terms, to the genre and style of novels. In the sense of genre classification, a genre is a unique form exhibited by different types of literature in their content organization and structural methods. It serves as the basis for literary classification and is also the most prominent feature distinguishing the existence forms of literature. It is self-evident that as an independent genre within the family of literature, the novel possesses its own specific defining characteristics that distinguish it from other literary genres such as poetry, which we commonly refer to as "novelty." Then, what aspects primarily manifest this "novelty" of the novel? System theory holds that the relationships among the internal elements of a thing determine its nature. And it is precisely because of its specific constituent elements and the structural ways of these elements that a novel is defined as a "novel." However, regarding the "novelty" of the novel, although we can consciously sense it through the accumulation of aesthetic experience during the reading process, it is quite challenging to theoretically clarify which elements and their structural ways constitute the novel and its different body-styles. This is because, from a diachronic perspective, the form of the novel has undergone several transformations over its long development from its origins to the present, rendering the original novel model unrecognizable in modern novels. From a synchronic perspective, there are varying degrees of transitional, permeative, and intersecting phenomena among different literary genres, making the concept of a "pure genre" merely a virtual one.