A Critical Study On Wei Junyi's Editing Practice And Literature Writing

Wei Junyi, as a revolutionary intellectual, had lived a life that is interwoven with such "grand narratives" as national liberation, the nation, proletarian revolution, etc. Her status of a revolutionist and a cultural official compelled her to abide by the CCP's norms of discourse. But as an intellectual, she was inextricably bound by her old artistic personality, structures of feeling, and thought patterns. As a result, personalized discourse and revolutional discourse fell into constant conflict and confrontation. These experiences, both trying and complicated, have left a vivid trajectory in her texts:from being encouraged by the left-wing literature to join the revolution, to running to Yan'an full of utopian ideals; from voluntarily accepting Mao's order of discourse, to suffering from Yan'an Rescue Movement which shook her faith; from a short-lived manifestation of individuality at the early stage of the nationwide liberation, to the forced acceptance of the ideological remoulding; from being swamped under the complete "non-self" during the Cultural Revolution period, to achieving great self-enlightenment through painful reflection in her later years...Wei Junyi forever caught between politics and literature to survive, her essays, poems and novels serve as a true record of the struggle of her soul. Based on an analysis of all the works of Wei Junyi, the thesis undertakes to get an overall and comprehensive grasp of Wei Junyi's revolutionary mentality through the reflection of her life experience and the construction of a pan-text context in the process of intertextual reading.Moreover, Wei Junyi was also an outstanding editor. She once worked for such major magazines as China Youth, Literary Study and People's Literature as an editor, and later, served as the editor-in-chief of the Writers Publishing House and the director and chief editor of People's Literature Publishing House. Engaged in literary editing for more than forty years, Wei Junyi actively participated in the construction of contemporary literature in the spirit of "serving others" and selfless dedication. Thanks to her work, many talented young writers came to emerge in the contemporary literary arena and contributed a large number of excellent literary works. Magazines, newspaper supplements and publishing houses are important carriers of literary production, while editing work is an integral part of literary production. The editor's ideas of running a periodical and standards of selecting texts directly affect the operation of the literary journal, and have a complext relationship with the cultivation of authoring groups, the formation of literary trends and the final shape of a text coming into existence. However, in the composition of orthodox literary history, the voice of editors and publishers is almost absent. Researchers resultingly focus more on the evaluation of texts, neglecting the specific process of text production and the inner relations between editor, publisher and litarary work without questioning. In the traditional conception of literary system, the editor is only at the writer's service, while the editor's independence and autonomy has not been fully recognized. This thesis, with Wei Junyi's editing practice as its focal point, starting from the shadowy points shrouded by the narration of literary history, commits to digging deeper to discover the pre-histhory of literary texts when they first came out, and investigating the relationship between the operation mechanism of periodicals and the cultural context of the times. Meanwhile, it engages in recalling and researching historical records and discussing editorial thought.Devoted to a comprehensive study of Wei Junyi, this thesis adopts such different perspectives as text, editing practice, publishing media, revolutionary mentality and gender, etc., in an attempt to present the perfect, rich, and diverse facets of the subject in question. The thesis combines external studies with internal studies, by analyzing Wei Junyi's works and editing practice and taking the anatomy of her spiritual journey as the main thread. Endowed with both a macro-historical perspective and a detailed analysis of the text, the thesis is expected to make some solid progress on the basis of the existing research, and finally move a step forward.