Author ｜
Chen Shuo-win
Abstract ｜
While proletariat literature and leftist ideas thrived in the early 1930s in China, the movement for nationalist literature, launched by the KMT (Guomindang) government, emerged in response to it. Qianfeng yuekan (Vanguard Monthly), a representative journal of this movement, was published by the “Xiandai Publisher” in Shanghai. The periodical made a major contribution to the theoretical development of nationalist literature.The authors and funders of this journal are associated with the literary society called “Vanguard”, which existed briefly in the early 1930s, and was well connected to the Shanghai literary circle. While advocating the nationalism of Sun Yatsen in the literary sphere by publishing novels, poems, and plays of the nationalist literature and movement, the editors and authors of the Vanguard Monthly also paid considerable attention to finding theoretical justification in foreign literatures. Through examining the translation of foreign literature in Vanguard Monthly, this paper investigates how the editors and authors of the Monthly interpreted foreign literatures, and formed a concept of national literature by borrowing foreign literature as an inspiration. Moreover, by examining the exotic writing of Huang Zhenxia, the most important Chinese nationalist literature writer, this paper explores how the editors and writers of the Monthly imagined the new China, by mimicking and modifying “the colonial gaze” of the foreign other. This paper concludes on how the national cultural imagination was interwoven with foreign literature and culture, and elaborates on the complexity of modern Chinese culture and literature in the early twentieth century.
keywords ｜
movement for nationalist literature, Qianfeng yuekan (Vanguard Monthly), Huang Zhenxia, translation of foreign literature, national culture imagination.