After the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, China's feudal society had declined and was on the eve of collapse. Domestic conflicts are unprecedentedly acute, and social crises are everywhere. The Qing government was extremely fatuous and decadent. Starting in 1840, the cannons of foreign capitalism opened the door to the closed-door feudal empire and opened the prelude to China's modern history. Chinese society is gradually undergoing fundamental changes. The self-sufficient natural economy in the countryside collapsed at an accelerated pace, and a capitalist economy emerged along the coast, quickly forming abnormally prosperous modern cities like Shanghai. New classes—the Chinese proletariat, bourgeoisie, and even the comprador bourgeoisie—also emerged. “The imperialist powers’ invasion of China, on the one hand, contributed to the disintegration of China’s feudal society and the emergence of capitalist factors in China, turning a feudal society into a semi-feudal society; but on the other hand, they cruelly ruled China , turning an independent China into a semi-colonial and colonial China." (Note: "Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party", "Selected Works of Mao Zedong", Volume 2, page 593.) From this. Since then, the contradictions between imperialism and the Chinese nation, feudalism and the masses of the people have become the main contradictions in the historical development of modern China. In order to save the nation from peril, from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to the Revolution of 1911, the Chinese people carried out revolutionary struggles again and again. At the same time, "the advanced Chinese people, after untold hardships, are looking for the truth from Western countries" (Note: "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship", "Mao Zedong's First Collection", Volume 4, page 1406.), therefore The spread of various ideological trends in China since the Western Renaissance has injected new content into modern Chinese culture.
As an important part of social ideology and the entire culture, literature must reflect these changes in modern China and adapt itself to these changes. In the process of gestation and development of modern literature, many new phenomena have appeared. During this historical period, although feudal literature still existed in large quantities, progressive literature with the main content of resisting the invasion of foreign powers and demanding freedom from feudal shackles was also produced, and various reforms were made more than once over a long period of time. The efforts of old feudal literature. As early as the Opium War, relatively enlightened landlord-class intellectuals such as Gong Zizhen, Lin Zexu, and Wei Yuan revealed in their poems and essays the pain of the era of "thousands of horses in silence" and the social situation of "the autumn atmosphere has changed in the world, and it is difficult for one room to have spring"; at the same time, , also called for the "wind and thunder" of reform, expressing the urgent need to resist foreign aggression. During the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom revolutionary movement, it was proposed that "text should be documented", "classical language is not necessary", and "there is no need for half-words to be vain" (Note: see Hong Renqian et al., "Abandoning Flooding and Clever Words", "Selected Works of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom", page 98. )'s reform ideas also produced some relatively popular works with revolutionary content. With the development of the political reform movement, the bourgeois reformist cultural movement gained momentum at the end of the 19th century. Zheng Guanying's "Warnings in the Prosperous Age" and Wang Tao's "Reform" and "Reform and Self-strengthening" all had suggestions for cultural innovation; Kang Youwei relied on Confucius' name to seek restructuring, which to a certain extent impacted the feudal orthodox culture at that time; and The rise and activities of more than 50 societies, schools, and newspapers including the Qiang Society, the Nan Society, and the Qun Society (Note: See Appendix 1 of Liang Qichao's "Record of the 1898 Revolution" "The Origin of the Reform". In fact, there are more than this number.) in the short term. , and is directly related to this movement. In literature, there were calls for the reform of feudal orthodox literature (mainly the ancient poetry and Tongcheng poetry). The more influential ones were the "poetry revolution" proposed by Tan Sitong, Xia Zengyou and others, and the "poetry revolution" promoted by Liang Qichao and others. "New Style".
It was Huang Zunxian who made great achievements in poetry reform. As an excellent "new school" poet, Huang Zunxian not only recorded the major historical events that occurred at that time in his works, but also expressed a strong spirit of patriotism and a desire for political reform. In literary theory, he had long "worshipped the vernacular and discarded it". "Classic Chinese", changing the old style to make it "applicable to today and popular among the people", "in order to make the naive farmers, industrialists, merchants, women of the world understand the use of writing" (Note: see Huang Zunxian's 1887 "Japanese National Chronicle" Volume 33 " "Academic Chronicles (2)"); his own poetry creation also somewhat achieved what was said in the poem "Miscellaneous Feelings": "My hand writes with my mouth, how can it be restrained by ancient times", and began to get rid of some of the constraints of old poetry rhythms. . Liang Qichao's new-style prose that promoted reformist ideas was known for its "easy accessibility" and its influence was even wider.
At the same time, the emergence of vernacular tabloids has prompted some people (such as Qiu Tingliang and Chen Ronggun) to clearly state that "vernacular literature is the foundation of reform" and "nothing can enlighten the people more than words of reform" (Note: Qiu Tingliang, Chen Ronggun) He wrote articles such as "On the Vernacular as the Foundation of the Reform" (1898) and "A Brief Comment on the Use of Newspapers" (1899). The reformist literary movement caused particularly significant changes in literary styles other than poetry. Novels and dramas have always been considered unrefined by orthodox feudal literati, but they were taken seriously before and after the Reform Movement of 1898. First of all, due to the needs of the political reform movement, and secondly due to the development of the printing industry, the prosperity of emerging cities in modern times and the establishment of newspapers and periodicals, novels were produced in large numbers during this period, and their social status was also continuously improved.
"On the relationship between novels and mass governance" (Liang Qichao), "Principles of novels" (Xia Zengyou), "On the position of novels in literature" (Di Pingzi), "On the relationship between novels and reformed society" (Wang Wusheng), "On the relationship between novels" Articles such as "Power and Its Influence" (Tao Youzeng) and "Yu Zhi's View on Novels" (Xu Nianci) were published successively. Their common tendency is to emphasize the political significance of novels and their role in social education.
Under the theoretical advocacy of Liang Qichao, "If you want to renovate the people of a country, you must first renovate the country's novels", novels have become a powerful tool for new-school intellectuals to expose the old world and promote new ideas, and a new generation of novels has directly emerged. batch of professional writers. Titles such as "political novels", "social novels" and "scientific novels" came into being. "The Appearance of Officialdom" and "The Strange Current Situation Witnessed in Twenty Years", which Lu Xun called "novel of condemnation", were generally welcomed. For the same reason, translations and presentations of Western works also began. According to statistics, more than 1,500 novels were published in the late Qing Dynasty, and translated novels accounted for two-thirds of all novels.
Among them, Lin Shu’s translation had a greater influence at that time. Thereafter, during the period of bourgeois revolution, a group of writers represented by Zhang Taiyan and Nanshe were produced, and works such as "Flowers of the Sea" and "The Warning Bell" were produced; Ma Junwu, Su Manshu and others translated Goethe, Byron and Snow Lai's poems; they all played a positive role in propaganda against the Qing Dynasty and the national democratic revolution. It is worth noting that the new drama form of drama, which was strongly promoted after the "May Fourth Movement", also began to be introduced during this period under the name of "new drama" or "civilized new drama". From 1917 to 1918, Chunliu Society and others successively performed "The Record of the Black Slave" in Japan and Shanghai; the Evolution Troupe later performed various stage plays to promote the revolution in various places along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River; these activities It not only cooperated with the Revolution of 1911 from the ideological front, but also injected new blood into our country's drama.
The above situations show that modern progressive literature not only served the political struggles of the time, but also reflected in ideological content (anti-imperialist and anti-feudal tendencies to a certain extent) and literary forms (reforming poetry, advocating vernacular, focusing on In terms of novels and imported dramas), necessary preparations were made for the emergence of new literature after the "May Fourth Movement". It can be said that modern progressive literature is a transition from the literature of the feudal era to the new modern literature. It is only "a transition", and modern progressive literature has its own insurmountable weaknesses and limitations. Just as the political struggles throughout the old democratic revolutionary period failed to complete the task of anti-imperialist and anti-feudal, the literature of this period also failed to fulfill its historical role of thoroughly anti-imperialist and anti-feudal. Bourgeois reformist literature did not fundamentally deny the feudal system; it not only defended the Qing Dynasty politically, but also ideologically did not dare to directly touch the foundation of Confucianism - Confucius' theory.
The main representatives of the reformists, such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, quickly became reactionary after the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898. In many new-school works, feudal ideas still have a place. Although calls to promote vernacular Chinese appeared in the late 19th century, most of them advocated vernacular rather than opposed classical Chinese, or advocated that books and newspapers could use popular vernacular, and that literature must still maintain the elegant classical Chinese. Even if there are one or two correct opinions, Also because of the immature conditions of the times, it did not arouse widespread discussion and create a large momentum. The work of translating Western literature was also in a blind, passive and unsystematic state at that time. Although Lin Shu translated many translations, he all used Tongcheng ancient Chinese with some modifications.
The literature of the bourgeois revolutionary period also failed to clearly distinguish between feudal thought and anti-feudalism, and was never able to directly and clearly put forward slogans against the old feudal literature. The revolutionaries themselves were out of touch with the masses, and the conservative attitudes of some representatives on issues such as the unification of languages ??and the adoption of vernacular, all hindered them from launching a powerful movement of ideological enlightenment and literary reform while organizing the Revolution of 1911. As a result, their cultural influence was even less than that of the reformers. As for imperialism, neither the bourgeois reformists nor the revolutionaries can understand them from the class nature and have many illusions about them.
In addition, a fundamental weakness of the old democratic literature is that although it can vividly expose the corrupt life of the upper class, it has an extreme lack of understanding of the conditions of the working people. With the successive failures of the Reform Movement and the Revolution of 1911, a part of literature that once played a progressive role was finally corroded by the foul atmosphere in modern cities known as the "Ten Miles Foreign Market" and tended to degenerate: "condemnation novels" became "condemnation novels" "Shady novels" even became "slanderous books" dedicated to slandering private enemies; the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School works that appeared in the early Republic of China and were devoted to "talented men and beautiful women" initially had a slightly progressive tendency (lamenting the harshness of the world, dissatisfaction with the lack of freedom in marriage) etc.) and gradually evolved into "romantic novels", "narrow evil novels" and even pornographic novels that are full of clichés, far away from real life and rich in ideological poisons. The new civilized dramas have also lost their original fighting color and are full of the vulgarity of the small bourgeoisie. Sensual and in bad taste.
This development of modern literature profoundly confirms Comrade Mao Zedong’s famous conclusion about modern culture: “The old bourgeois democratic culture has become corrupted and powerless in the era of imperialism. , its failure is inevitable." (Note: "On New Democracy", "Selected Works of Mao Zedong", Volume 2, page 657.
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