This paper examines in detail how Zhou Zuo-ren, leading essayist and theoretician of the personal essay in the 1930s, turned the essay, the most free, independent, and informal of all the literary genres, into a vital...This paper examines in detail how Zhou Zuo-ren, leading essayist and theoretician of the personal essay in the 1930s, turned the essay, the most free, independent, and informal of all the literary genres, into a vital medium for the cultural and political self-assertion of the modern Chinese men of letters and for the making of a vernacular aesthetic by incorporating Western values with a rediscovered tradition of individualism and self--expression in classical Chinese literature, thus conforming to the tasks of the New Literature of breaking free from the prison-house of an over-coded cultural system into the refresh, raw experience of the mundane daily world and of transforming the language of the everyday into a refined mode of expression suitable for the expanded horizon of the enlightened individual.展开更多
文摘This paper examines in detail how Zhou Zuo-ren, leading essayist and theoretician of the personal essay in the 1930s, turned the essay, the most free, independent, and informal of all the literary genres, into a vital medium for the cultural and political self-assertion of the modern Chinese men of letters and for the making of a vernacular aesthetic by incorporating Western values with a rediscovered tradition of individualism and self--expression in classical Chinese literature, thus conforming to the tasks of the New Literature of breaking free from the prison-house of an over-coded cultural system into the refresh, raw experience of the mundane daily world and of transforming the language of the everyday into a refined mode of expression suitable for the expanded horizon of the enlightened individual.