Title: Introduction to Chinese Cultural History / The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature / 01.4 War Period: Literature and National Salvation (1937–1945)

Front: What were the political regions of the war period?
Back: - "Communist-controlled area around Yan’an in the northwest,
- the Japanese-occupied coast, and
- the GMD-held southwest"

Front: How has the literature of the war period been misrepresented in literary histories?
Back: - PRC view of great homogeinity somewhat polemically described by Denton: "writers happily abandoned their personal motivations for writing and devoted themselves and their pens to the political cause of national salvation"
- emphasized: theory and practice in Yan'an
- underemphasized or ignored: work in GMD and Japanese controlled areas

Front: In the war times, what styles of writing made their "last stands" and what was on the rise?
Back: - “last stands”:
  - realism,
  - romanticism,
  - modernism,
  - regionalism, and
  - popular literature
- on the rise:
  - revolutionary literature
  - national salvation literature

Front: What May Fourth notion came under assault during the Yan'an rectification campaign?
Back: The idea of "the writer as the voice of 'critical conciousness', an ideal embodied in the figure of Lu Xun".

Front: How was literary resistance againt Japan organized in the war years?
Back: Umbrella organization is called The All China League of Resistance Writers.

Front: What kind of works did the All China League of Resistance Writers promote?
Back: National forms or old forms appealing to a rural as well as an urban audience, including:
- "storytelling,
- ballads,
- New Year’s prints,
- local opera, and
- Peking drum singing" and
- "'street plays', short propaganda dramas performed in villages"

Front: In the more heterogenous literary scene of the 1940s, what returned in GMD-controlled areas?
Back: "realism and romanticism returned as writers shifted their attentions away from the war"

Front: What was cultural production in occupied Beijing and Shanghai like?
Back: - "popular-entertainment fiction and escape were the rule of the day"
- "Japanese occupiers sought to stem political dissent and largely succeeded"
- "historical costume dramas were occasionally used allegorically to promote resistance," (popular in Shanghai)
- Eileen Chang wrote short story collection Romances
- Shi Tuo: non-propagandistic lyrical essays and experimental fiction
- Yang Jiang: "contemporary comedies that satirized intellectual pretension and social climbing"

Front: What styles were promoted in Yan'an CCP cultural policy?
Back: - "national defense literature",
- "national forms"

Front: Ding Ling and others "experienced difficulty abandoning May Fourth notions of the role of literature" – What was it they did, thinking they had Party backing to do so?
Back: "they began to publish essays and short stories that exposed problems in Yan’an society:
- party privilege,
- the unequal place of women,
- thought reform of intellectuals,
- absence of freedom of speech,
- and the like"

Front: What was Mao Zedong's reaction to the criticism of Yan'an culture by Ding Ling and others?
Back: He held a conference and gave the "Yan'an Talks" on party cultural policy, which also applied similarly in the PRC 1949 onwards, in short:
- "literature is subservient to political interests, and
- writers should write for and about the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers."