The Inner Logic of Modern Literature and the Fate of Modern Chinese Literature

The present article attempts to explain the fate of modern Chinese realist and modernist literature in terms of the inner logic of modern literature.This article holds that the reason why modernism did not enjoy a full-blown development in modern China is that the scientific world-view has rapidly replaced the traditional Chinese worldview of heavenly principles and that as a result Chinese intellectuals didn't experience the profound disillusionment and the sense of lost as felt by modern Westerners.On the other hand,the inner conflicts between objective observation and subjective construction in its theoretical assumptions helped realism develop into the dominant literary form in modern China,a direction different from that in Western societies.