As an important part of social ideology and the whole culture, literature will inevitably reflect and adapt to these changes in modern China. During the gestation and development of modern literature, many new phenomena have appeared. In this historical period, although feudal literature still existed in large numbers, it also produced progressive literature with the main content of resisting foreign powers' aggression and demanding to get rid of feudal shackles, and made various efforts to reform feudal old literature more than once for a long period of time. As early as the Opium War, Gong Zizhen, Lin Zexu, Wei Yuan and other more enlightened landlord class intellectuals revealed in their poems the pain of the times and social conditions of "four seas become autumn, one room is difficult to spring"; At the same time, it also calls for the "wind and thunder" of reform, showing the urgent requirement of resisting foreign aggression. During the revolutionary movement of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, it was put forward that "words are documentary", "classical Chinese words are redundant" and "half words are illusory" (Note: See Hong Rengan's "Clever Words Free from Floating" and "Selected Works of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" on page 98. ) of the reform thought, also produced some more popular and revolutionary works. With the development of political reform and reform movement, at the end of19th century, the bourgeois reformist cultural movement became increasingly high. Zheng put forward the suggestion of cultural innovation in "Dangerous Words in Prosperous Times", and Wang Tao put forward the suggestion of cultural innovation in "Reform and Self-improvement". Kang Youwei tried to change the system in the name of Confucius, which impacted the feudal orthodox culture at that time to some extent. And more than 50 societies, schools and newspapers, such as Qiangshe, Nanshe and Tuanshe (note: See Appendix 1 "The Origin of Reform" of Liang Qichao's "The Coup of 1898". Actually, that's not all. The rise and activities in the short term are directly related to this movement. In literature, there has been a call for reforming feudal orthodox literature (mainly parody of poetry and Tongcheng literature). Among them, Tan Sitong and Xia Cengyou's "Poetry Revolution" and Liang Qichao's "New Style" have great influence.
It is Huang Zunxian who has made great achievements in the reform of poetry. As an excellent "new school" poet, Huang Zunxian not only described the major historical events that happened at that time in his works, but also showed strong patriotism and reform desire. Moreover, in literary theory, there was a long time ago a saying that "vernacular Chinese was worshipped and classical Chinese was abandoned", which changed the old style and made it "appropriate and popular". "If you want to make all the women in the world naive, you can use words" (note:) ideal; His own poetry creation, as the poem "Miscellaneous Feelings" said, "I wrote my mouth by hand. How can I restrain myself?" He began to get rid of some shackles of the old poetry meter. Liang Qichao's new style prose, which advocates reformism, is known as "easy-going" and has a wider influence.
At the same time, the emergence of vernacular tabloids has prompted some people (such as Qiu and Chen Rongqi) to clearly put forward that "vernacular is the foundation of reform" and "inspiring people's wisdom is nothing like the words of reform" (Note: Qiu and Chen Rongqi respectively wrote "On Vernacular is the foundation of reform" (1898). ) and other claims. In addition to poetry and prose, the reformist literary movement has also caused particularly significant changes in literary style. Novels and dramas have always been regarded as unpretentious by orthodox feudal literati, but they have always been valued before and after the Reform Movement of 1898. First, because of the needs of the political reform movement, and second, because of the development of printing industry, the prosperity of modern emerging cities and the establishment of newspapers and periodicals, a large number of novels were produced during this period, and their social status was constantly improved. He has successively published On the Relationship between Novel and Group Governance (Liang Qichao), The Principle of Novel (Xia Cengyou), The Position of Novel in Literature (Zhai), On the Relationship between Novel and Improved Society (Wang Wusheng), On the Power and Influence of Novel (Tao Youzeng) and Yu's View on Novel (Xu Nianci).
Under the advocacy of Liang Qichao's theory that "if you want a new national character, you must first create a new national novel", novels have become a powerful tool for new intellectuals to expose the old world and publicize new ideas, and a number of professional writers have emerged directly. Political novels, social novels and science novels came into being. Lu Xun called it "condemnation novel", "official appearance" and "strange situation witnessed in the past 20 years" and so on, which were widely welcomed. For the same reason, it also began to translate and introduce western works. According to statistics, there are more than 1500 novels published in the late Qing Dynasty, and the translated novels account for two-thirds of the total.
Among them, Lin Shu's translation had a great influence at that time. Since then, during the bourgeois revolution, a number of writers such as Zhang Taiyan and Nanshe, as well as works such as Nie Haihua and Jing Shizhong have also emerged accordingly. Ma and Su translated the poems of Goethe, Byron and Shelley. They played an active role in propagating anti-Qing and national democratic revolution. It is worth noting that drama, a new form of drama strongly advocated after the May Fourth Movement, was also introduced in the name of "new drama" or "civilized new drama" during this period. From 1907 to 1908, Chunliushe and others performed "Black Slave's Night" in Japan and Shanghai successively. Later, the evolution group performed various scenes to publicize the revolution in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. These activities not only cooperated with the Revolution of 1911 on the ideological front, but also injected new blood into China's drama.
All of the above shows that modern progressive literature not only served the political struggle at that time, but also made necessary preparations for the emergence of new literature after the May 4th Movement in terms of ideological content (anti-imperialist and anti-feudal tendencies to a certain extent) and even in terms of literary form (reforming poetry and prose, advocating vernacular Chinese, attaching importance to novels and introducing drama). It can be said that modern progressive literature is a transition from feudal literature to modern new literature. Only if it is a "transition", modern progressive literature has its own insurmountable weaknesses and limitations. Just as all previous political struggles in the whole period of the old democratic revolution failed to complete the task of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, so did the literature in this period. Bourgeois reformist literature does not hold a fundamental negative attitude towards feudal system; It not only safeguarded the Qing Dynasty politically, but also dared not touch the foundation of Confucianism-Confucius' theory ideologically.
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, and feudal thoughts still occupied a place in many new school works. Although there were voices advocating vernacular Chinese at the end of19th century, most of them advocated vernacular Chinese without opposing classical Chinese, or advocated that books and newspapers could adopt popular vernacular Chinese, and literature still needed to maintain the elegance of ancient Chinese. Even if there are one or two correct opinions, it has not caused extensive discussion because of the immature conditions of the times, which has caused great momentum. The translation of western literature is also in a state of blindness, passivity and lack of systematicness. Although Lin Shu translated a lot, he used Tongcheng ancient prose, which was adapted.
Literature during the bourgeois revolution was not completely anti-feudal because it did not draw a clear line with feudal thought, and never put forward a slogan against feudal old literature actively and clearly. Revolutionaries themselves are divorced from the masses, and the conservative attitude of some representatives in unifying Chinese and using vernacular Chinese prevents them from organizing the Revolution of 1911, nor from carrying out a massive ideological enlightenment and literary reform movement accordingly, and their cultural influence is even worse than that of reformists. As for imperialism, neither bourgeois reformists nor revolutionaries can understand it from the class nature and have many illusions about it.
In addition, a fundamental weakness of the old democratic literature is that although it can expose the corrupt life of the upper class to the fullest, it is extremely ignorant of the situation of the working people. With the successive failures of the Reform Movement of 1898 and the Revolution of 1911, some literature that once played a progressive role was finally corroded by the foul atmosphere in the modern city known as the "ten-mile foreign market" and tended to degenerate: "condemnation novels" became "shady novels" and even became "gossip books" dedicated to slandering private enemies; In the early years of the Republic of China, the works of Yuanyang Butterfly School with the theme of "gifted scholars and beautiful women" gradually evolved from a slightly progressive tendency (lamenting the cold world and dissatisfied with the freedom of marriage, etc.). ) has become a "romance novel", "narrow evil novel" and even pornographic novel, full of cliches, far from real life and full of strong ideological toxins. The new drama of civilization has also faded its original fighting color, and it is full of vulgar sentiment and low taste of ordinary citizens.
This development of modern literature has profoundly confirmed Comrade Mao Zedong's famous assertion about modern culture: "The old bourgeois democratic culture has been corrupt and incompetent in the imperialist era, and its failure is inevitable." (Noe: On New Democracy, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 2, p. 657. )