On The Chinese Students’ Quarterly And May Fourth New Literature

The Chinese Students’Quarterly is a Chinese journal representing all the Chinese students studying in U.S., founded in1914by them in the second tide of studying in U.S. From the first issue on the eve of the May Fourth Movement, the quarterly served as the forum for the improvement of Chinese characters and the issue of stylistic innovation before the New Culture Movement, which played an important role in promoting the literary revolution. Where New Youth is the birthplace of the New Culture Movement in China, the quarterly is the front of the literary revolution in educational circles among the students studying in U.S.The first part of the first section combed the overview of the quarterly historically. In the quarterly were published a lot of new literary people’s poetry, fiction, drama, essays and so forth. Some of them could be called the pioneering work of the new literature, which helped we glimpse the face of the new literary period. So the second part tried to find out the character of the face when the new literary happened, and see the western literature’s impact on China’s modern literature, especially that of American literature.The relevance between the quarterly and the revolution in literary encompasses three aspects:discussions on improving language, Hu Shih’s slogan of literary revolution, and reaction against new literary.The second section expounded that the starting point and ultimate goal of the literary revolution as one is universalization of education and improvement of community. The revolution of language is the key to it. During the discussion, an idea of literary improvement began to germinate in Hu Shih’s mind. Those articles by Hu Shih and his U.S. colleagues, such as Mei Guangdi, Ren Hongjun manifested Hu Shih’s alteration in literary improvement. His attitude shifted from improving of classical Chinese for convenient teaching to a complete replacement of the classical style of writing by vernacular Chinese becoming more and more radical in the repeated debate.The third section’s goal is to study the reaction which the new literature met with. First, Conservatives with the representative Wu Mi assailed the new literary on the quarterly arousing a brief climax of controversy over the old and new literary. The debate between Wu Mi and Qiu Changwei highlighted the conflict essence between the classical position of the new humanist and the Romantic spirit of literary evolutionists. Afterwards the wave of opposition consolidated itself as Critical Review School, the important forces of cultural conservatism.Second, the other one is New Moon Poetry School with the representative Wen Yiduo. The literary revolution started from poetry. A core issue of the literary revolution was the change of the poetics concept, which was raised by free vernacular verse. As follower of Hu Shih in writing new poems, Wen Yiduo was impacted by the American new poetry movement and modernism while studying in the United States. His concept of poetics had changed gradually, leading him to advocate metrical poetry against free verse advocated by Hu Shih, which had been a guide for the maturity of new poetry.