The Narrative Form Of Modern Chinese Poetry In The First Half Of The 20th Century

In view of its great achievements in narrative modes, Modern Chinese poetry in the first half of the 20th century has been often narrowly defined as narrative poems for the literary genre or realistic poems from the school of thought. Thus in addition to the further exploration of these aspects mentioned above, a careful, detailed study on the narrative forms in that era becomes indispensable for the "elimination of frauds" in the research of Modern Chinese poetry. Since the vast expanse of the content and category that the narrative of Modern Chinese poetry covers is really beyond the scope of average researcher, each individual could only focus on a single aspect and endeavor to probe into it intensively for yielding some positive results. Evidently, those general narrative forms of Modern Chinese poetry, like narrative discourse, style and strategy etc., turn out to be the integral part of relevant research work. Specifically speaking, this study, on the basis of figuring out the narrative from modern poetry and furthermore digging out the poetic quality from the narrative of modern poetry, aims at summing up the relevant narrative strategy, forms and typical features of Modern Chinese poetry, and making a survey of the corresponding narrative system as well.The narrative of Modern Chinese poetry contains some inherent features of temporal spirit, national character and artistic quality. Therefore, this research must be carried out from the perspective of its own narrative styles and the related creative phenomenon of Modern Chinese poetry, rather than putting the western theory of narratology mechanically into the specific practice of Chinese poetry. With the guidance of the newly-occurred "western narratology of poetry" together with Chinese classical "narrative of ancient Shihua", a concentrated discussion will be conducted, in which a series of methodologies related to modern linguistics, structuralism, phenomenology, new criticism, hermeneutics, medio-translatology will be taken to analyze those concepts of "Modern Chinese poetry", "narrative of poetry" etc. and investigate the entire progress of narrative forms during the first half of 20th century as well as its artistic approaches and laws through the detailed elaboration and deduction.As for the narrative of Modern Chinese poetry, it doesn’t just refer to that of literary genre, but consists of other forms of artistic expressions. It is considered another non-negligible poetic tradition in addition to the lyric tradition of Modern Chinese poetry, in which Chinese classical narrative system with the quality of " poetic narrative" and "prose-styled poetry" has been combined with the western narrative poetics effectively. Consequently, the narrative pattern of Modern Chinese poetry, gradually established during the period from late Qing Dynasty to the May 4th Movement and further developed in 1940s, naturally possesses a consistent trait of multi-modernity. In the first half of 20th century, three different and unique narrative forms have been developed through abundant practice in narrative of Modern Chinese poetry:"realistic narrative" with the style of objective recording, "presentative narrative" by the means of implication and symbolism, and "situational narrative" with the traits of dramatization or theatricality. Meanwhile, these three narrative forms of poetry are not hierarchically related but in a state of interdependence and mutual development. The only distinction lies in the fact that the presentation and special emphasis of each varies a lot in the different historical periods. While there still exists a common ontological characteristic among them, that’s an unceasing pursuit of the poetic sentiment in narrative, which is in fact mainly demonstrated through a series of creative skills like "poetry segments", "blanks of poetry" (including the peculiar words, expressions, phrases, sentences, stanzas and canto etc.) and what’s more the pertinent "voices of poetry" as well.To sum up, the narrative of Modern Chinese poetry in the first half of 20th century, dominated by the pursuit of modernity and epitomized by poetic "segmentitity", gradually develops into three distinctive and unique narrative forms from late Qing Dynasty to 1940s, including realistic narrative with the feature of "recordivity", presentative narrative characterized by "allusivity", and situational narrative with the quality of "performativity".