Modern Echo Of The Chinese Literary Tradition And Its Relationship With The "modern"

This dissertation will center its discussion on a certain literary phenomena characterized by "falling back on traditions" and "integration of elegance and popularity", which both Zhao shuli and Zhang ailing shared in their novels that was respectively completed in liberated area and in enemy-occupied area in 1940s. Taking "modernity" as the core concept of our theoretical argument, we analyze in detail the historical succession first from "late Qing Dynasty to early the Republic of China, then from the May 4th Movement of 1919 to the 1940s when Zhao and Zhang reached their primes. With this approach, we aim to unravel the schemes, practices, successes and failures taken or undergone by the mainstream literary ideologies at different times when they endeavored to deal with Modernity in Chinese modern novel. Furthermore, the complicated interactions among these practices along with their influence will be discussed.During the process of our detailed analysis a key finding emerges: even with a one-sided understanding of the concept of modernity, the modernization of Chinese novel has still been kept in touch with classical literary tradition in countless ways, though such a process, which dated from late Qing Dynasty, always strove to shake off the grip of classical literary tradition from the outset. With the coming of the period of 1940s, Zhao and Zhang, who were faced with rural peasants and urban citizens, two types of totally different readers, chose two kinds of classical literary tradition for their...