The Profound Influence of Linguistic Change on the Development of Modern Chinese Literary Forms

Literature is the art of language, so in the light of the profound influence of linguistic transformation on the development of modem Chinese literary forms it is appropriate to present the history of the development of modern Chinese literature as the art of language. Modern Chinese literature starts with the linguistic transformation of the May Fourth Movement＇s rejection of classical Chinese and promotion of the vernacular. This language revolution and the transformation of literary language during each subsequent historical period have exerted a profound influence on the overall development of modern Chinese literature, including literary forms, and hence have become an inner source of the development and evolution of modern Chinese literary forms and of the shaping of their main characteristics. An in-depth discussion of the interaction between linguistic transformation and the development of modem Chinese literary forms as well as the roles governing this process will not only disclose the universal linguistic context of literary creation created by the transformation of language but will also enable us to find the historical sources of the phenomena of literary genres and forms, writers＇ choice of literary styles, the formal characteristics of literary works, etc., and will offer a correct explanation and evaluation of the May Fourth vernacular movement and the subsequent series of new literary forms andstyles. This is instrumental to achieving a better summation of the experience and lessons of the development of modem Chinese literary forms and to finding historical clues to the development of our present-day literary forms.

Overcoming Thresholds and the Mysterious Travels of Literary Influence:Why National Canons Cannot Be Projected onto the Big Canvas

World literature studies has to navigate between idealism and realism:the idealism of creating a broader and more inclusive understanding of the world's literature,and the realism ofhow literature circulatesand has to overcome manythresholds to changecanonization.The increased recognition of how translation is a necessary part of world literature has done much to lay the grounds for an increased engagement with literature in non-European languages.I propose that an understanding of key patterns in the interational circulation of literary works can provide a better critique of the imbalances of canonization,and the inspiration for the inclusion of neglected works in the future.

Literary and Cultural Encounters:Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World

Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern media.For centuries,colonization and slavery,trade and business,teaching and research have instigated migratory movements that changed the direction of literature.Cultural encounters fostering exchange of values, themes,forms and languages have been and still are the driver of this process,making such encounters more salient for literature than the local confinement of national literatures which,after all,has only been a predominant practice during the last few centuries.This dynamics of exchange has been most challenging and productive,when they have also been most complex and marred by conflicts,as has been the case between cultures defined not only by different languages but also by different cosmologies and anthropologies.In this article I discuss literary and cultural encounters on the basis of the Indian-Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World(1916),in which the encounter happened between Western,mainly European,and Eastern,in this case Indian,and world views clashed to the detriment not only of the life of characters but also of their entire social environment.Beyond its social themes the novel offers through its narrative structure a view of the full complexity of encounters with a resonance in today’s globalized world.