Relevance Study On "Culture Revolution Literature" And "New Period Literature"

The period of time from culture revolution(1966-1976) to the New Period (1976-present) in China is not only a time for a significant social change but also a time for an important change in literature. Generally, perspectives on the literature of this period time can be categorized into two groups.One of them is the perspective of disjuncture.It emphasizes subversion that the post-culture-revolution literature has brought to the culture revolution literature yet rarely refers to the connection and development between the two. In the 90's of last century, since the understanding towards culture revolution literature was more comprehensive, a relevance study had been initiating. Researchers who advocated this study had found out positive aspects of Subterranean Literature (the literature written secretly during the time of Culture Revolution) and paid attention to relevance between the Subterranean Literature and the New Period Literature(1976-present).Until now, people has been paid far more attention on the Subterranean Literature than the published literature of the time of culture revolution as well as well-analysed the Polite Literature (the literature that not are written for propaganda or entertainment) However, there is an obvious deficiency:discussions on the published literature during the culture revolution period were few while studies on the left-wing literature of the time from the culture revolution to the New Period were also under strict control.In fact, many authors who had published during the culture revolution were insisting on writing after that particular time.In this sense, studies on their work will be very valueble to the genre change research.Besides,although some of the Edge literature works have been found out, they should receive more attention since they are still in a sensitive position of "ban and destroy". This paper will combine theories such as the "New Criticism", "Narratology" and "Intrinsic approach to the study of literature" with Marxism to avoid any excessively abstract conclusion or isolated analysis.The first chapter is discussing the historical background of the transition time from the Culture Revolution to the New Period. During this period of time, relationship between literature and politics was extremely complicated.Struggle within authorities had led to unstable political and literature environment. Arguments in the Chinese literature academia on the relationship between literature and politics were especially fierce:Some of the literature works were closely related with politics while others were intentionally avoiding politics.Scholars at the time of culture revolution can be categorized into two kinds:one is called "Shiyu" who lost their rights to express their ideas or lost their freedom to speak the truth; the other is named "Aizhi" who read, wrote and conducted academic studies secretly. It is just the latter's persistence that has assured the preservation of the Chinese culture in an extremely intense political environment and guaranteed scholars'images of the New Period to upgrade to elites with the cooperation of ideologies, medias and themselves. Besides, conditions were not improve until 1985,for instance tolerance and rationality were rare and literary criticisms were always going with politics.Moreover, perspectives of literary history had been through significant change twice and finally the rise of the "Polite Literature" and "Modernism"The next chapter displays multiple changes within lines.Literature genres during this special period were various whereas having connections with each other, for instance genres of "Zaidao" (the literature work with a great amount of preaching),"Yanzhi" (the work which is aiming to bring strength to people and encourage them to pursue a goal with determinations),and Modernism collided with each other. At the mean time authors' intrapsychic cleavage and conflicts and self-development had made the situation more complex.For example, authors like "Shizhi", "Gaoxiaosheng", "Liangxiaobin" showed their conflicts in their works.Literature reform at the time of transition started from contents,and then went to formats.From an overall point of view, literature subjects during this time updated from monotony to pluralism and were much closer to real life.Characters had been lacking of individuality and politicalized at the very beginning but gradually tended to be more individualized later. The traditional linear sequential development mode and plot-centred structure collapsed in the trend of getting rid of traditional plot-centred mode. During the transition period, besides the linear sequential development mode and literature diversity that have mentioned above, there were also many connections between literatures of different time in a non-linear-sequential-development-mode.For instance, some of the literature works that had been written secretly during the time of culture revolution were practicing adequately a mode of psychological description and the poems among this type of works were shining with sparkles of modernism which had exceeded the following literatures of the new period of time to some extent.In comparison with them, the literature works that were written at the very beginning of New Period such as Scar literature, Reform literature, had not made any impressive progress in aspects of subjects, plots, characters and languages.In fact, they just maintained the writing mode of main stream literature at the time of culture revolution. Both of the gradual changes and sudden changes can be seen in the works of some authors, for example Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi and Zhang Jie.