Ceng Piao, Empty White And His Son And Study Groups "truth, Kindness And Beauty Writers"

In1927, Zeng Pu and his son, Zeng Xubai, started their literary cause by opening the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Publishing House and Magazine, which lasted for nearly4years. By publishing a lot of books and articles of literature and art, they united and attracted a group of writers, translators, and students who shared similar artistic ambition and literary tendency. The Zeng’s hosted a literary salon as a means of welcoming and communicating with their comrades. Meanwhile, they got fame and celebrity in the public sphere of modern urban culture and discourse power of expressing their opinions on literature and art by operating commercial capital in the field of literary writing and editing. They made exploration in the modern transformation of Chinese literature and sincerely proposed their designs and blueprints of literary reform. Their shared efforts, similar pursuit and aesthetic temperament helped them be recognized by their comrades and the literary circle and united them into a so-called the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.The following paper, by analyzing and studying the literary activities and achievements in literary writing and translation of this group of writers who conceived a strong sense of literary reform and showed the characteristic and generality of the literary circle of the1930s, reflects on the ways of thinking, means, cultural pose they deployed when participating in the reform of literature, and their experiences at their time and the way they are commented and related in the present written history of modern Chinese literature. From the perspective of literary reform, the paper observes the way the1930s’literature tried to compound Chinese and foreign literary resources in the tension of political interference and literary commercialization, and concludes the significance of it in the history of modern Chinese literature. The argumentation of the paper goes as follows:Chapter I is the introduction part, which, from the perspective of the relationship between the literature of late Qing dynasty and modern literature in the academic view of the history of20th century Chinese literature, deals with the achievements of the study on Zeng Pu, Zeng Xubai and the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, the major problems the author of the paper wants to solve and the means of argumentation applied. Chapter II is entitled The Literary Ideal and Achievements of the Zeng’s, which categorizes the historical literature and records of the Zeng’s participation in literary activities, and outlines their open and tolerant cultural pose under the influence of the culture of Changshu, their birthplace, and their family tradition, and their cultural ideal reflected in the process of realizing their cultural dream of’spreading the new while removing the old’ and political ambition of’save the country by eliminating the difficulties’.Chapter III presents the historic conditions and fact of the foundation of the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Publishing House and Magazine, and their literary activities. In this part, the author pictures the living principles of the1930’s Shanghai cultural creation and presents the achievements of the publishing house and magazine. On the latter, Zeng Pu and Zeng Xubai systematically defined’truth’,’beauty’and’goodness’ as his personally recognized literary ideal and artistic standard. Meanwhile, they set a stylistic scale of literature as the principle of literary form and the orientation of aesthetics.Chapter IV deals with the formation the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and their cultural pose and shows their special means of life appreciating literature in a French style salon held in both Zeng Pu’s sitting room and the publishing house, which was indeed a kind of inward-to-outward cultural communication. Their cultural poses were kind of pursuing’greatness’and’popularization’, abandoning the standpoint of enlightenment, breaking the non-literal partitions, nurturing one’s cultural audiences and establishing’the literature for the mass’, with the help and conduction of the mass media such as papers and magazines.Chapter V focuses on the publicity and commercial promotion of literature conducted by the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. They designed some very creative columns, events and collective’cultural performance’to market their writing, opinions on literature and themselves as a literary group, which was a means of struggle to survive in the fierce competition of commercialized literature in the1930’s.Chapter VI is about their accomplishments in the field of translating and introducing foreign literature to China. Their theoretical opinions and technical trials on translation are significant to the development of modern translation, because they creatively proposed their basic position and two conceptions of ’accommodating difference and exoticism’ and ’systematic translation’. Chapter VII is the concluding part, which observes from the perspective of its literary assertion, ideal, ways of organization, relationship with the main stream of the literary circle and its destiny, and finds out that the member writers of the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness were representatives of the active participants in the reform of modern Chinese literature and they were in touch with but yet kept a proper distance from the new direction of the mainstream of ’New Literature’------revolutionary literature, which reveals the deep gap and conflicts between their aesthetic ideal and the practical need for literature. The achievements and destiny of the Literary Group of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness provide us with a very unique perspective and insight into the literature of the1930s.