Protestant Missionaries On The Understanding Of The Modern Chinese Language And Literature From The English Newspapers

Late Qing is a golden period of intercommunication between China and western countries. During that time, western missionaries came to China in the hope of preaching. However, it was too difficult to change Chinese people's mind because of the rooted traditional Chinese culture. In order to enlighten Chinese people, missionaries changed the Chinese language and literature step by step by active teaching and translation. In this thesis, I was trying to see what roles missionaries played, and what kind of influence they had on the modernization of early modern Chinese literature.The thesis is divided into three parts. In the first chapter, I focus on two topics. The first one is the controversy of classical Chinese language and colloquialism, and the second one is the Romanization of Chinese language. Missionaries had done a lot in the language movements and had made great progress. With the help of missionaries, the colloquialism literature finally defeated other kinds of Chinese literature. In the second chapter, I focus on three topics:the criticism to traditional Chinese literature, the advocation of new literature, and the construction of Christian literature. As a result, missionaries changed the style and features of Chinese literature significantly by these actions. In the third chapter, I primarily discuss the relationship between missionary and the popularization of Chinese literature. In my perspective, the missionary actions, such as colloquialism movement and literature reformation, greatly helped the popular novels become the mainstream of the Late Qing literature. In this chapter, I focus on four topics:the change of missionary object, the relationship between colloquialism movement and popularization, the Christian's novel and the rise of popular literature, the media and the literature popularization.Missionary had done amazing jobs to change Chinese language and literature. They not only heightened the status of colloquialism greatly, but also publicized the new literature idea. What's more, they created the conformation of Christian literature, and promoted the popularization of light literature. In the end, Chinese intellects inherited part of their achievement, and promoted the modernization of Chinese culture and society. Missionary, together with Chinese intellects, profoundly changed Chinese language and literature.