Abstract
The Chinese writers who, looking for direction to the West in the 1910s and 1920s, rebelled against the aesthetics and preoccupations of traditional Chinese literature, nonetheless accepted the age-old premise of literature as the conveyer of morality. Certainly, most of them would argue that their Dao (as in the formulaic expression wenyi zaidao, “literature and the arts carry the Way”) was nothing like that of their predecessors, who had used an effete language to write on irrelevant and antiquated subjects. Indeed, they would shun the conceptual vocabulary of Dao altogether. Like their intellectual forefathers, however, they would say that literature is written to a moral purpose.
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Notes
This is noticed also at the outset of Wang Jianzhao, Zhong-E wenzi zhijiao: E-Su wenxueyu ershi shiji Zhongguo xin wenxue (Guihn: Lijiang chubanshe, 1999), pp. 4–8.
Wang Yougui, Fanyijia LuXun (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2005), pp. 138–41.
Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 42.
Qian Gurong, “Xu” (Introduction), in Chen Jianhua, 20shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1998), p. 1
C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 22.
Peter Burke, “The Renaissance, Individualism and the Portrait”, History of European Ideas, vol. 21, no. 3 (May 1995), pp. 393–400
In the 1920s, the propagator of Western literature Zheng Zhenduo was also prominent among the scholars who rekindled interest in premodern illustrated editions of Chinese fiction. See Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29
The main treatment of “humanism” in China, through the twentieth century, must now be Hao Minggong, Rendao zhuyi yu Ershi shiji de Zhongguo wenlun (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005).
On the positions of Critical Review, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 246–56
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© 2010 Mark Gamsa
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Gamsa, M. (2010). The Russian Classics as a Moral Example. In: The Reading of Russian Literature in China. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106819_2
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