War, Revolution, and Urban Transformations: Chinese Literature of the Republican Era, 1920s-1940s

Abstract

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved. War, revolution, and urban transformations were recurrent themes in Chinese literature from the immediate aftermath of the New Culture Movement of 1917 to the violent mid-century transition that ended the Republican era on the mainland. Various literary schools, societies, and communities formed, regrouped, expanded, merged, or disintegrated, an indication of literary production becoming a hotly contested political battleground where various interests, discourses, and ideologies converged and combated with each other. The progressive literature, from the iconoclastic voices of the May Fourth period to left-wing writings of the 1930s and 1940s, was often set against the volatile background of rural reforms, urban movements, and wars. While literature produced in communist-controlled rural areas in the 1940s anticipated a new literary landscape to take place after the mid-century transition, urban literature of the period thrived in a flourishing print culture and sustained an ever growing middlebrow readership through the turbulent era.