The modern Chinese literary tradition that emerged along with the May Fourth Movement has already spilt over into every aspect of contemporary Chinese life. As shaping force in Chinese literary and cultural evolution, this “New Tradition” calls for renewed critical scrutiny. In the face of new contemporary challenges that threaten to subvert the May Fourth literary tradition, the value of this tradition calls for grave reconsideration. This paper, as part of a research on the formation of the New Tradition, views this literary tradition as “a chain of interpretative variations” which has undergone the incessant interpretative selections, siftings, and moldings of historians as well as literary critics of various historical phases, and which nevertheless cannot go beyond the limits of their times. This paper examines how literary historians and critics from the 1920s to the 1940s evaluated the New Literature, how they constructed their perspectives on literary history on the basis of their evaluation, how their theories and ideas have come through the decades to bear upon people’s conceptualization and evaluation of the New Literature. The paper aims to map the trajectory of the cognizance of modern Chinese literature as well as some of the significant stages in the early days of the New Tradition.

This article takes Shen Congwen’s early experiences as a set of historical materials, and uses them to analyze changes in the self-constructed identity of a young littérateur in the midst of Beijing’s transformations. These transformations include new modes of social mobility, the reconstruction of urban cultural structures, changes in interpersonal social networks, and restrictions to increases in social class. They represent social preconditions for much of the early history of New Literature. Accordingly, this essay attempts to create new narrative possibilities in the literary history of the period.

As a southern literature in China, Haipai Literature is rich with local characteristics. Nevertheless, it transcends any local restrictions at the same time, in the sense that it reflects the features of modern urban literature. Haipai Literature represents the earliest efforts and attempts of modern urban literature in China, manifesting the complexities of modern Chinese literature. As a new literary paradigm, Haipai Literature is not only flexible and innovative, but also adaptable to the modern urban life, becoming a modern mechanism of literary production and delivery. All literature-related systems, such as the earliest remuneration system, professional writers, literary magazines, newspaper supplements, were concentrated in Shanghai. These systems reflect from one profile the unique value and significance of Haipai Literature in the history of Chinese literature. To study Haipai Literature does not mean to reminisce, but to reexamine and make use of historical resources in the systemic innovation of modern literary mechanism. From the emergence and development of Haipai Literature, in the typological sense, it could be drawn that what kind of inner and outer premises are needed in the development of a new type of literature.

Probing into and reflecting upon the historical progress and significance of the interpretation of Chinese modern literature, the paper addresses the following several important issues regarding to the standardization and construction of the discipline of Chinese modern literature, namely, how is Chinese modern literature described and interpreted as it is today? How is the concept rationalized and legalized? What are the main factors that compromise the literary concept dominating modern literature interpretation? This paper also examines literary meetings and the formation of contemporary Chinese literature. Because of the specific social qualities of China and its complicated relationship with literature, the literary meetings have become a way for the government and the party to administer and organize literary culture.

Taking the profound impacts of generalized system, new electronic media, and subculture into consideration, this paper holds that, presently China has entered an era of comprehensive social transition, along with the tendency that the era of the former unified or centralized literature (criticism) values will come to an end. For this reason, literary criticism will probably go into public space in a generalized form. The formation and bearing of public reason and social justice or moral law should become the conscious duty of current literary criticism. This article, whose textbook cases arise, in the main, out of Renmin wenxue put out from 1949 to 1976, states how the accredited commission to write on the given topics in the general sense has acquired the special status of political culture, and therefore assumed the specially-designated significance, function and value in the literary institution of modern China. And organizing manuscripts not only occupies a direct role in being involved in the creation of literature, but also makes a subtly different history of literature that gives a reflection of the politically motivating force for the authorized literary compositions.

Chopin gives us answer through her treatment with the three women characters in The Awakening. Like a new-born child, Edna begins to explore her real identity in the new world after she awakens from a long sleep. She does not realize that she has no power to motivate man to help her achieve her dream. The other female character worth mentioning is Adele—a seemingly perfect woman in that society. The next female character is Mademoiselle Reisz. She is an independent artist-woman. All of the three women just reflect Chopin’s awakening of women’s social identity and her confusion with the choice of life. That is also why Chopin just leaves us an open ending in this novel. All of the three women just reflect Chopin’s awakening of women’s social identity and her confusion with the choice of life. That is also why Chopin just leaves us an open ending in this novel.

In the novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison digs out the negative impacts the mainstream culture exerts on the black people through the depiction of the tragedy of the Breedlove family. The Breedloves are always after their dreams of building an ideal ego in their self-pursuit, but the adverse circumstances in the white-dominated society give them no “Other” to project in their self-building, thus making their frail efforts all in vain. Under such a hostile environment, they are mentally forced to linger in their prolonged mirror stage and this is just the reason for their self-splitting. The Breedloves are stuck in the permanent contradiction of the Mirror Stage, and the insurmountable conflict between their ideal ego and their real life sets the tone for their tragic life. This article attempts to present the mental sufferings the white society sets for the blacks through an analysis of the life track of the Breedloves in accordance with Jacques Lacan’s theory.