Content area
Abstract
Translation from original language as provided by author
A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, the masterpiece of C.T.HSIA, an overseas scholar, was disseminated into China through various channels in 1980s and aroused great disputes in the academia. In 1983, Wen Yi Bao called many scholars together to upbraid publicly C.T.HSIA's opinions in the book, with attacks focused on his anti-communist stance and his negative comments on the left-wing writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun. However, another voice hided behind open criticism. A growing number of scholars started to absorb some ideas and writing approach of the book, and Zhang Ailing, Qian Zhongshu and Shen Congwen, who were disesteemed by the literary circle in the 1950s, returned to the reading sphere of the public as they were thought highly of by C.T.HSIA, and today their publications are taken as classics by readers. This dissertation is a tentative testament and affirmation of the attitude of public upbraiding and private acceptance towards A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, which is widely shared by the academia of China's mainland, according to Chen Zishan. By analyzing the language context in the 1980s, we may find that the return of modern enlightenment movement and the dissemination of the western modernism create a kind of acceptance mechanism for the private acceptance of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. C.T.HSIA's emphasis on the review of the artistic value of modern fiction and his advocacy of the eternal human nature coincide with the language context of the 1980s as they deliver explicit protest against the political trend of literature. Therefore, Chinese scholars actually did not completely negate A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. On the contrary, C.T.HSIA's approach of writing literary history has great impact on these scholars. The movement of rewriting literary history, initiated by Wang Xiaoming and Chen Sihe, is a natural result of the enlightenment of the book. This text thinks that the dissertation strives to prove certain connections between disputes over the book and its western perspective. As C.T.HSIA upholds spirits of the Great Tradition and New Criticism, his view towards the literary history, critical standards and approaches are accompanied with rich western styles. He endeavors to create a new literary tradition that transcends times and is universally applicable. Obviously, this new tradition collides with the one that has been widely accepted by the academia of China. However, judging from cross-cultural dialogues, disputes between heterogeneous cultures are inevitable. There is no surprise that C.T.HSIA's western stance, theoretical background and expectations make it hard and impossible for him to take Mainland's stance into careful consideration. For modern scholars, C.T.HSIA's observations complement the research on the modern Chinese fiction. A close study of C.T.HSIA's criticism on works by Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, Qian Zhongshu and Shen Congwen may provide us access to literary fragments obscured by the academia of the mainland China, offering more possibilities for the research of modern Chinese
