An Introduction to the Influence and Development of Western Literature on Contemporary Chinese Literature

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Research fellow of Centre for Middle East Studies, Faculty of International Studies, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China

2 Associate Professor of Centre for Middle East Studies, Faculty of International Studies, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China

Abstract

The three mainstream literary ideological movements of the West, i.e. romanticism, realism, and modernism, have left many and different effects on the literature of other nations during a period of a hundred years and experiencing many ups and downs in the West. In the meantime, Chinese literature has also received special and different influences from western literature, lack of examination and different reflection of which can be felt in literary studies. The author is trying to briefly examine the different influences of western literature on contemporary Chinese literature as well as the political and social contexts arising from it. Through analyzing and comparing contemporary Chinese literary works, this research explains the effects obtained by the structural forms of contemporary Chinese literature after encountering the West three ideological movements, i.e. romanticism, realism and modernism, and then by introducing authors and works of this era, tries to provide a clear understanding of how they are influential considering the traditional forms that govern Chinese literature. The crystallization of the Chinese literature values coincided with the end of the 19th century, which is the era of the emergence of various Western modernist ideas, and reached its maturity under the influence of the World War I and the socialist revolution. In fact, contemporary Chinese literature emerged from the global modernism literary thought movement. Despite, it should be noted that what has influenced the new Chinese literature is not the entire time and place of western literature, but rather modern Chinese literature is often influenced by European literature in the period the European industrial capitalist system was being formed. The influences that the Chinese have taken from Western literature include mainly those parts of "modern" Western literature that responded to their "tendency to be modern”, not the limited themes of the "school of modernism".

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Scientific Biannual Journal of Language and Culture of Nations
Volume 5, Issue 9
July 2022
Pages 89-116

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