A Hundred Years of Chinese Literary History: A Discussion

Author: Chen Liao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-08-01
Features: Since 1988, when Chen Sihe and Wang Xiaoming proposed the concept of "rewriting literary history," the idea has taken root in academia. Scholars have made various attempts in response, including reevaluating and reinterpreting writers and works, compiling popular literary histories, studying the literary histories of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as discussing topics related to literary production, such as publishing and printing industries. These efforts have opened up new spaces for literary history research. However, a comprehensive literary history theory that encompasses all of the above remains eagerly anticipated.
Since the mid-1980s of this century, some literary historians proposed the concept of "20th-century Chinese literature," and there are generally three opinions on the periodization of the development of Chinese inland literature over the past century:
One view holds that 20th-century Chinese literature has completed the transition from a classical to a modern form and belongs to the scope of world modern literature. Therefore, it only possesses modernity and lacks the characteristics of modernity until the 1980s when some modernist elements emerged, and these elements intensified rapidly in the 1990s but still did not exceed the boundaries of modernist trends. According to this perspective, they classify the Chinese inland literature from the late 19th century to the late 1970s as modern literature, while reluctantly categorizing the literature from the 1980s onward as modern literature. That is, 1900–1979 is classified as modern literature, and 1980–1999 is considered not strictly modern literature.
Another view considers 20th-century Chinese literature to be a composite of modern and modernist elements, with complex interactions between the two. From 1900 to 1917, modernity is predominant; from 1917 to the present, modernity is dominant. This divides the century into two parts, but the first part is very short, while the second part is much longer.
A third view classifies 1900–1917 as modern literature, 1917–1976 as modern literature, and 1977 to the present as contemporary literature. It is said that contemporary literature should not be included in historical records. We believe that for the periodization of the development of Chinese inland literature over the past century, literary historians can only divide it scientifically according to the true nature of literary history. In other words, the periodization of Chinese inland literature should have an objective standard. This standard must consider the following factors or principles:
1. Has the social nature changed? The greatest contribution of Marx and Engels to the issue of literature is that they established historical materialism. This not only provides writers and artists with the most correct and effective tools to observe and express life to date but also offers literary historians a good guide to solving the periodization problem of Chinese inland literature over the past century. Historical materialism holds that social existence determines social consciousness; after the economic base changes, the superstructure and ideology will inevitably change sooner or later. People should not seek the root of ideological changes within ideology itself but should look for the reasons in the changes of social existence and the economic base (of course, ideology also has its own historical development). Literature is an ideology, though a special one, but its production, development, and changes are still constrained by social existence and the economic base through various intermediaries. If the social nature changes, the literature that arises from that society will also change sooner or later, becoming different from the literature of the previous society, thus inevitably giving rise to the issue of literary history periodization. For example, primitive society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, and socialist society are societies of different natures, and correspondingly, the literature of each society (oral literature in primitive society) is also different. Without historical materialism, arbitrarily determining the periodization of modern, modernist, and contemporary literary history without considering whether the social nature has changed will be untenable.