Understanding and Dialogue

Author: Zhu Liyuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-06-01
Features: The literary theory of China in the 20th century experienced a winding path of development. It is generally believed that the first few decades of the century and the last few decades were relatively better periods for the development of Chinese literary theory. Naturally, the 1930s and 1940s were also a time when some important literary theory works emerged. At the beginning of the century, the development of Chinese literary theory initially showed great promise. Liang Qichao championed the "poetic revolution" and "novel revolution," linking literature with the tasks of saving the nation and its people, which was also influenced by the national context. Meanwhile, under the influence of 19th-century German philosophy, Wang Guowei broke free from China's millennia-old political-religious literary perspective, advocating that literature should serve life and raising the issues of literary independence and autonomy. This was both earlier and more profound in argumentation compared to the later literary autonomy theories of American and Russian formalists. However, the trend of literary theory development is not entirely determined by individual scholarship or aesthetic tastes.