Wandering Between Literature And History

Saga novel is one of the characteristic themes that are of most containing and expressive power in the history of Chinese literature in 20th century. Narration of family matters often includes complex social, historical and cultural connotation. At the beginning of 20th century, with enlightening consciousness as the essence, Lu Xun becomes one of the pioneers launching an attack to the traditional family culture by'Diary of a Madman', which announces longstanding disadvantages of traditional culture. As a thinking route with profound influence, this narrative strategy, carrying out cultural criticism with the aid of saga narration, penetrates into many family novels such as'Family','Four Generations in One Household'and'A Richman's Children'from the 1920s to the 1940s. After the 1950s, political consciousness obviously strengthens in family narration. In family novels such as'the Red Flag Spectrum','Three Lanes', the center of creation is changed from cultural criticism into the expression of class consciousness. In the middle and last 1980s, a turning point emerges in the creation of saga novels, which takes on different writing characteristics from former ones in literary consciousness and historical conception.Presumably, saga narration takes on vivid individualized writing characteristics since the 1980s. Writers deal with writing by their own memory, which is the product of awakening individual consciousness. In spite of people's mass ideas and public memory on history in the 1950s, the awakening of individual consciousness leads to the reflection on people's historical ideas in the narration of saga novels, especially those on the former narration of Chinese modern revolutionary history.In a sense, it is believed that the saga narration bears some non-saga characteristics in 20th century's Chinese literature, and its writing route is to take a family's fate as a chance and describe a nation's prosperity and decline.