Abstract
The Song of Youth, a story of a young woman’s awakening to her sexuality, political identity, and social agency in prerevolutionary China, became one of the most beloved novels from the Maoist period. Female author Yang Mo wrote the book for educated readers; feminist film critic Dai Jinhua describes the journey of a young student from individualism to revolutionary activism as “a handbook for the thought reform of the intellectuals.”1 Chapters 7 through 14 narrate the experiences of the main character, Lin Daojing, as she joins peasants in the countryside to revolt against a local landlord. These chapters were not present in the original 1958 novel; along with three chapters dealing with the organization of a strike in the end, they were added in 1960 in response to criticism of the petty-bourgeois nature of the book and particularly its main character. With these revisions, Yang Mo was able to satisfy the majority of her critics, convincing them that the representation of the main character’s journey contained sufficient evidence of her interactions with members of the peasant and working classes, the portion of the citizenry that held the privileged position of “the people” in Maoist China.2 Critics writing today often dismiss these chapters, insisting they show the interference of a heavy-handed propaganda machine and disrupt the otherwise straightforward narrative of an individual’s maturity.3
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Notes
See Dai Jinhua, “Qingchun zhi ge: Lishi shiyu zhong de chongdu” (The Song of Youth: A rereading in historical vision), in Tang Xiaobing, ed., Zai jiedu: dazhong wenyi yu yishi xingtai (Rereading: people’s literature and arts movement and ideology) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152. She refers to the film version in her essay.
Two of these criticisms have been reprinted in Li Yang’s 50–70 Niandai Zhongguo wenxue jingdian zai jiedu (50s-70s: A rereading of classics in Chinese literature) (Ji’nan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 105–7. Yang Mo herself, in a postscript written in 1960, remains convinced that the revisions have improved the novel, and stridently defends them.
See Yang Mo, “Qingchun zhi ge zaiyin houji” (Notes on the reprinting of Song of Youth), in Zhongguo dangdai wenxue yanjiu ziliao: Yang Mo zhuanji (Research materials for contemporary Chinese literature: Yang Mo) (Shenyang: Shenyang Shifan Xueyuan Zhongwen Xi, 1979).
Lu Xun, “Nala zou hou zenyang,” (What happens after Nora leaves?)” in Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun), (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban, 1998), 1:159.
The page numbers cited in the text are from Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge (Song of Youth) (Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 1996). This translation comes from Yang Mo, The Song of Youth, tr., Nan Ying (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 113.
See Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi,” (On the relationship between fiction and the governance of the people), in Xin xiaoshuo (New fiction) 1902. English translation in Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
See Cheng Fangwu, “Cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue” (From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature), in Chuangzao yuekan 1, no. 9 (February 1, 1928). Reprinted and translated in Denton, 274–75.
For a study of Qu Qiubai’s literary activities see Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’u Ch’iu-p’ai (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).
See Bonnie McDougall, “Introduction,” in Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1980).
See John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3.
See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32.
See Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 202.
See Mao Dun, “Fakanci, (Words on the First Issue)” in Renmin wenxue (People’s Literature) 1, no. 1 (1949): 14.
For a brief history of the uses of the word propaganda as it related to artistic composition see Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 7–15.
See Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 107–8.
See Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967),
and Cyril Birch, ed., Chinese Communist Literature (New York: Praeger, 1963).
See Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since Ivan Denisovich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 2.
See Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 5.
See Daniel Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (New York: Routledge, 2012). While I agree with Vukovich that we need to reexamine our position toward China as Sinologists based in the West, I do not share his seemingly total castigation of the field of China studies vis-à-vis the Maoist period. In the decade since I began working on this period numerous studies have been published, all with a much more nuanced interpretation of culture, history, and gender relations, to name a few, in the period.
See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7.
For an excellent discussion of the production of culture in Yan’an, see Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).
See Tina Mai Chen, “Propagating the Propaganda Film: The Meaning of Film in Chinese Communist Party Writings, 1949–1965,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 2 (2003): 187.
For a concise definition of “invisible literature,” see Chen Sihe, “Qianyan,” in his Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shijiaocheng (History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, A Textbook). (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2000) 12.
In Chinese, 国统区 guotong qu, 解放区 jiefang qu, and the foreign controlled areas 沦陷区 lunxian qu. For more on the need for new unity, see Hong Zicheng, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi, (A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chuban, 1999), 14–16.
See Hong Zicheng, “Renmin wenxue he Wenyi bao” (People’s Literature and The Literary Gazette), in Cheng Guangwei, ed., Dazhong meijie yu Zhongguo xiandangdai wenxue (Mass media and Chinese modern and contemporary literature) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2005), 262.
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© 2013 Krista Van Fleit Hang
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Van Fleit Hang, K. (2013). Introduction: Reading People’s Literature. In: Literature the People Love. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363220_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363220_1
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