The Past, Present and Future of the Compilatory Studies of Modern Chinese Literary History

The compiling of modern Chinese literary history started in the 1920s. Originally, all the editors and compilers, who tried to write about the history of the New Literature, considered it as a kind of new tradition in contrast to the Old Literature. In the 1930s the compilatory work for the history of the New Literature reached one of its heights, and in the 1950s it was characterized by the following factors: it was a representation of national ideology; it became a new discipline of which the unified teaching program was developed by the state government; it brought about a widespread mass movement for collective editing and compiling of literary history. As a matter of fact, the emergence of collective compilation, and the criticisms on a wide range of the 1950s' writings on the history of the New Literature proved to be a process, which practically induced the birth of Modern Literary History and Contemporary Literary History. In the 1980s, influenced by the then discussions on literary subjectivity and identity, the editors and compilers proposed that literary history be freed from the history of political revolution and reconstructed from the perspective of aesthetics, which provided wider scope for continuing the studies on Chinese literary history of the twentieth century.