The Literary Controversy Of The 1940s And The Contemporary Literary Norms Construct

Modern history of Chinese literature, in a sense, refers to the literary history of controversy, which lasted from the 1917 Literature Revolution until the first National Literary Congress in 1949. These controversies, either large or small, took place over 80 times. They appeared so many times and frequently that it turned out to be rare in the history of world literature. What's more important, in the 1940's, the literary controversies tended to embody the conflicts between different political ideas, concepts and powers, as a result of the particular war background and the harsh social environment, which made the literary nature of controversy fade out. Based upon the interval literary history in the 1940's (a particular period as an observation point) and the Modern Nationalist Theory by B·Anderson, the thesis is designed to make a dialectical investigation and scientific analysis of the forties literature controversies together with both sides (or multi-sides) of controversy, in terms of viewpoint, issue background, problematic unfolding, theory basis, hidden political-cultural logic, etc., in an attempt to reveal the historical influence of the forties literary controversy on the development of modern or contemporary Chinese literature, as well as the relation between the controversy and the construction of contemporary Chinese literature standards in the historical and logical combination. That is to say, from the perspective of "literary controversy", the author of the thesis makes every effort to display thoroughly the development history of the forties literature, look objectively into several important standards of contemporary literature: "the struggle theme of nation or class", "the aesthetic characteristics of nationalization and popularization", "the worker-farmer-soldier orientation of literature", "the socialist realism creation principle", "literary criticism with political criterion in the first place" and so on, as well as their concrete construction process in the wartime contexts of the 1940's, and thus shows the accurate mastery of the historical process of the forties literature development in the course of the analysis and commentary.