Modernity: the Character of the Twentieth Century Chinese Literature

How to define twentieth century Chinese literature? What makes twentieth century Chinese literature fundamentally different from ancient Chinese literature? Yan Jiayan and Yuan Jin begin their discussion with a review of the Jia Wu War and the Wu Xu Reform (1894—1898). They then examine the characteristics and the development of twentieth century Chinese literature. They argue that what characterize the Chinese literature are the modernist thought and modernist aesthetics.