6 - Opposition, Imitation, Adaptation and Diffusion in Popular Chinese Literature

Summary

This study has followed a trajectory of fiction in late Republican China by comparing the popular wartime literature by Xu Xu 徐訏 and Wumingshi 無名 氏 with the works of two 1930s Shanghai modernists, Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 and Mu Shiying 穆時英. As New Sensationist writers, Shi and Mu consciously set out to challenge the literary establishment and the precepts of good writing that guided the literary field of the time. By combining genres and styles from both the modern and the traditional, they were intent on undermining the notions of rationalism, progress and modernity as immutable and stable constructions. In their rejection of such constructs, they directly attacked the standards of progressive literature set out by the New Culture Movement before them.

By the early 1940s, the Shanghai modernist writers were no longer active, but their narrative style had left an impact that is rarely recognised today. The highly popular work of several writers, notably Xu Xu and Wumingshi, echoed the styles and tropes of Shi's and Mu's short stories. Due to the changes in historical and cultural context, the latter had ceased to function as modernist or avant-garde stances of protest. Rather, the narrative styles of the past avantgarde were adopted and adapted into the realm of popular writing, demonstrating a process of diffusion as previously challenging ways of writing became widely accepted. Wumingshi, however, did eventually shift to more experimental literature as well as attacking the prevalence of nationalism and ideology, and his novels of the late 1940s were among the last modernist pieces that were written before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

While both Xu Xu and Wumingshi would have been worthy of extended research projects on their own, they have been considered together in this study to achieve two aims: first, to show that the trend of modernist writing initiated by the New Sensationist authors had a lasting legacy in the wider development of Chinese literature; and, second, to show how such a trend was variously positioned in the literary field – at first a bold stand against the New Culture Movement's principles of good literature, and later a gradual absorption into mainstream popular culture.