From A New Form To A Renowned Literary Status

In May 1981, the Chinese Writers' Association established a prize exclusively for reportage. This far-sighted decision shows bold courage and wisdom and it's a heartening event in the history of the development of reportage.This is indeed a qualitative leap- forward. The long lagging behind reportage has always wandered between news and literature, not being able to find its own place. It now develops rapidly as an independent and ever-maturing literary genre in the literary field. This event indicates that reportage is no longer a subordinate genre of prose and has now gained equal status with poetry novel and drama. The whole thing proves,"people need reportage and it caters this need. Thus in the field of literature, it has already developed from its secondary status into a main form of literary genre." "Today it has become a unique and independent literary mode in contemporary literary field."Chnese reportage is the product of the modern society. Due to the development of industry and the popularization of printing and the appearance of newspaper, reportage gradually developed out of news report and became an independent literary form. In terms of time, it has an uneven but glorious history of more than 100 years. All those who are concerned with reportage is now confronted with the problem: what kind of role will it play in the new century? Its practices for more than 100 years and this time gap combine to create the best opportunity to examine it exactly and in a macro-perspectiveAfter relentless efforts to describe its historical changes during the past century, the by-gone research has achieved noticeable results. However, numerous defects still exist. One of the major ones is the lack of a systematic research into the historical process of its development and the law that governs it.I chose the title-the History of the Changes of Chinese Reportage with the intention to blaze out a new trail and to break the current research pattern. The main approach is: to establish a new frame of narrative history which is capable of reflecting the historical process of the development of reportage through combining macro-understanding and micro-perspectives, external historical research and the analysis of literary reports itself and also the historical facts and theories. The whole article includes six chapters. The introduction is mainly about the research goals and methods. Chapter 1: its budding and flowering. This is to explore different opinions about its origin. In China, reportage germinated in the middle of the 19th century. With the development of modem journalism, reportage made its appearance in China through the combination of journalism and literature. The newly sprung up reportage had not got its present name then, and even the writersthen did not realize that their works were creating a new literary form. However, it's destined to become a hot point in literary movement years later. Undoubtedly in their literary practices, consciously or unconsciously the writers formed some ideas about this new liteary form, which would be reflected in their works. From the perspective of reportage itself, these ideas marked the beginning of the awareness of this mode of literary production. The development of Chinese New Culture Movement during the "May 4" period provided the necessary conditions for the birth of Chinese reportage, and reportage began to develop from then on into an indepent literary form. On the whole, reportage during the 20s did not have standard forms in terms of the structure and language. Both these two features of reportage distanced somewhat from that of literature. The representative works then still neede further efforts from the writers.In the early 30s,the consciousness obout this literary mode has been shaped finally. During this period, the literary theory which is based on its own its own practices has formed a system, though there were still shortcomings. A quantity of guiding articles concerning its nature, role, mission, creation methods, techniques and so on help...