Title: Introduction to Chinese Cultural History / The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature / 01.3 Literary Diversification in the 1920s and 1930s: Leftist literature, modernism, and nativism

Front: How political were writers in the 1920s and 1930s?
Back: - "the degree to which writers adhered to the leftist revolutionary cause has been dramatically overemphasized by Marxist literary historians"
- "true that [...] May Fourth writers and [...] younger writers willingly embraced a political role"

Front: Why did writers turn to the left in the 1920s and 1930s?
Back: "has everything to do with political and historical circumstances:
- the success of the revolutionary Northern Expedition [...],
- the rise of Japanese imperialism [...], and
- Guomindang (GMD)
  - fascism and
  - its inattention to social problems.

Front: How did the leftward swing in literature in the 1920s and 1930s begin?
Back: "Qu Qiubai [...] perceptively attacked the May Fourth writers for their elitism, particularly their use of Westernized language and literary forms"

Front: How did Qu Qiubai label Westernized language and literary forms, and what did he promote instead?
Back: Westernized language and literary forms: "Western eight-legged essays, referring to the abstruse and formulaic essay of the late imperial examination system"
Promoted street vernacular and popular performance arts as better tools of social change.

Front: What is revolutionary literature?
Back: Critics of writers from bourgeois or gentry backgrounds promote revolutionary literature as written about the masses and in their interests. There were debates about whether or not bourgeois writers could become enlightened and produce revolutionary literature.

Front: What's the League of Left-Wing Writers? Who established it?
Back: The CCP established the League of Left-Wing Writers. Promoted "Marxist literary theory and published leftist literature in its many official journals". Realism and satire dominate. Mao Dun promotes naturalism.

Front: How is Mao Dun's writing naturalist?
Back: Wrote about economic hardship of peasants and how capitalism worked in Shanghai.

Front: How is the writing of Zhang Tianyi and Wu Zuxiang naturalist?
Back: "offered satirical portraits of a decadent gentry class"

Front: Was the Creation Society counter-revolutionary?
Back: - "“conversions” to the revolutionary cause,
- publicly decried their former individualism [...],
- power of literature to contribute to the revolutionary movement"

Front: What is another highly popular area of literature in the late 1920s and 1930s, besides leftist literature?
Back: "Butterfly fiction continued to be highly popular. Writers like Zhang Henshui reached a readership unimaginable to most of the progressive writers"

Front: What's one reason why Ba Jin's Family reached so many people?
Back: "precisely because it contains many tropes from the Butterfly tradition."

Front: Who promoted and wrote literary works in a Chinese modernist style, which some argue is different from Western modernism?
Back: Writers associated with the journal Les Contemporains, also referred to as New Sensationists wrote modernist literature and poetry.
One scholar argues that modernism could not fully develop because of the different historical circumstances, i.e. they could not critique their own historical modernity.
Others argue that the term should be more inclusive and not only include Western Europe and the US.

Front: Shen Congwen: what kind of life did his work most notably depict?
Back: Shen Congwen in the 1930s most notably depicts:
- "[...] rural areas,
- in a lyrical and
- nostalgic mode".
Contrary to the style promoted by leftist critics:
- "void of political jargon and the
- heroic revolutionary themes".
He also wrote romantic short stories.

Front: Towards the end of the 1930s, what happened to attempts to steer literature away from realism?
Back: The attempts "faded, but did not disappear, by the late 1930s". Historical pressures of the war against Japan.

Front: What name is usally attached to Shen Congwen's literary style?
Back: "nativist". Literary historians say he wrote about West Hunan. The romantic short stories do not fit very well into this framework.