Chinese Modernists and Their Metamorphoses

Abstract

Modernism is no stranger to China. There has been modernism in Chinese fiction. In the 1930s, writers like Shi Zhecun tried out the stream-of-consciousness technique in short stories such as The General’s Head and Pageant of Good Women. Freudian psychology was also resorted to. Some Chinese writers picked up European modernism through Japanese intermediaries and a rather hectic exoticism developed. But it was in poetry, perhaps, that the most determined efforts were made, in the 1930s and 1940s, to transplant European modernism.