Author ｜
Feng-ying Ming
Abstract ｜
The term of Literary Revolution has been most associated with the May Fourth Movement in Chinese literary history. The “search for the new,” however, started much earlier in Late Qing times, with the “new novel” movement. This paper provides new ways to conceptualize the Late Qing new novel, as it marks the beginning of the search for modern literature. It provides two new definitions of the “new,” one foregrounding the intellectual and ideological “new,” the other focusing more on the popular and phenomenal “new.” By means of these two definitions of the “new,” this paper teases out how the writing of the new novels oscillated between ideological conviction, instigated by the reform intellectuals, and popular newness, and how these two ideas became prevalent in late Qing society. This paper concludes that later 20th century writing has seen a repetition of this oscillation process, and can therefore be understood as the “matrix” of the new. The original material used in this paper includes works by Liang Qichao, Wu Jianren, Li Boyuan, Bao Tianxiao with reference to contemporary scholarship.
keywords ｜
new novel, ideological new, popular new, matrix of the new, oscillation