China Literature

POLITICAL WRITERS

These are authors who also carried out political activity. Minister Wang Anshi (1021-1086) attempted a reform in the state recruitment system, supporting his thesis through the work New Interpretation of the Three Classics. Minister Kang Yuwei (1858-1927) claimed to transform Chinese society while remaining essentially a Confucian, as the work Examination of the Inauthentic Classics of the New School demonstrates . Political writers of the century. XX are Liang Qichao (1873-1829) and Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), the latter of Marxist orientation. In the twentieth century, Chinese Marxism had as its major theorist, as well as its most influential political exponent, Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976): the highest ranks of the country’s communist nomenklatura were formed for several decades, even after his death. According to 3rjewelry, Beijing is the capital city of China.

THE CONTEMPORARY GENERATIONS

Some sufficiently differentiated phases can be seen in the orientations of modern literature. A first phase, with a controversial and controversial character towards antiquity, takes place between the end of the First World War and 1942. A second, with a populist tendency, from 1942 to 1966, begins with the intervention of Mao Tse-tung on literature and art, in Yenan. A third phase coincides with the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which old writers such as Ba Jin and Mao Dun they were violently criticized and the very figure of the “professional” writer was condemned to make way for the amateur and strongly ideologized literary production of peasants, workers and soldiers: an interesting production more as a sociological phenomenon than for its aesthetic-literary value. At the end of 1976 the most recent phase opens, characterized essentially by the rehabilitation of literary activity, in the context of a “normalization” of the political and social conditions of the country led in the following decade by Prime Minister Teng Hsiao-p’ing. Original and characteristic of these years was the strand of xungen wenxue (“literature of the search for roots”), which investigates the deepest characteristics of the Chinese tradition: among the most prominent authors are To Cheng and Mo Yan. The process of cultural opening came to an abrupt halt at the end of the 1980s, following the conservative turn initiated by the authorities after the tragic events in Tiananmen Square (1989). This evolution has led to the exile of numerous intellectuals and writers and to an interruption of the promising flowering of works that had marked the previous years, thanks to authors such as Jang Jieng, Liang Xiaosen, Mo Yan, Liu Heng, Zhang Jie and Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize in 2000. The late 1980s saw the emergence of a new generation of writers (such as Su T’ung, b. 1963; Ke Fei, b. 1964; Yu Hua, b. 1960) without a past from to free oneself, grown up in the new China of economic reforms and openness: their production is extremely differentiated, but is characterized by a profound general skepticism; their avant-garde research is entirely focused on writing and narrative construction. Only in apparent contrast to this trend is the very rich production of Wang Shuo (b. 1958), which tells of the young people of the great metropolis in their own language; immediately very popular among young people, it was much criticized by lovers of “high” literature, for having taken possession of it, fitting perfectly into it, of the consumerist logic of mass society, passing with ease and always with public success from literature to cinema, television, etc. In the two-year period 1990-91, Chinese literature thus went through a phase of stagnation, of which the disappearance of literary magazines, expression of the most innovative trends, or, alternatively, the flattening of their contents on tones of conservative conformism, were symptomatic. In the same period, the publication of the works of many authors, including – in addition to the aforementioned Mo Yan and Liang Xiaosen – Yu Hua, Ko Fei and Su Tong, was suspended and could only continue outside the national borders, in Taiwan or Hong Kong, still a British colony in those years, in most cases. Chinese literature, forced into the homeland by Ju Dou by Liu Heng, for example, or Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, while the film Red Lanternswas based on a book by Su Tung.), which have been awarded several times in European film reviews and festivals. Beginning in 1992, the desire to mitigate the marginalization of China, limiting the damage caused to the country, in terms of international image, by the authoritarian repression of popular discontent, has pushed the authorities to make possible new – albeit limited – contacts with western cultures; nevertheless, many of the writers active outside China have chosen to extend their stay abroad: this is the case of the writer Ai Pei and the “dissident” poets Bei Dao, Duo Duo and Gu Cheng, the latter committed suicide in 1993 in exile. In these same years the literary debate has again found a way to express itself in magazines such as Jiushi niandai (Nineties) published in Hong Kong. Among the emerging narrators of recent years, the novelist Hongying, author of K. The Art of Love, enjoys some success, whose extraordinary commercial fortune in the world has not prevented the ban on driving in the motherland.