FOUR CASE STUDIES

LITERARY SOCIETIES AND THE LITERARY FIELD IN PRE-WAR REPUBLICAN CHINA
(1911-1937)

By Michel Hockx

The pre-war Republican era in China (1911-1937) witnessed the birth of modern
Chinese literature and the emergence of what may be considered the earliest
independent literary field in Chinese culture. One of the most conspicuous
features related to the production of literature in this era is the large
number of literary societies. This project intends to study the way these
societies functioned and the reasons for their formation, with the ultimate
aim of gaining a better understanding of the relations between individuals,
collectives, and ideas within modern Chinese literature. The project relates
to larger trends and debates within Chinese studies and sides specifically
with those scholars who advocate for more attention be paid to historical
agents and their positions within the literary field.
The notion of the field as a "space of relations between positions" stems from
Bourdieu, whose work inspires the methodology underlying this project to a
large extent . It is not the aim of this project to present, as Bourdieu has
done in one of his latest works 'Les rŠgles de l'art' (1992), a comprehensive
treatment of the "genesis and structure of the literary field". Considering
the relative complexity of the literary field in Republican China, with no
strong state to support orthodoxy, while there was a constant input of new
concepts and discourses from the West, it is not feasible to take on the field
as a whole. Instead, the project focuses on one very stable and
well-documented institution: the literary society alluded to above.
After having performed a simple semantic analysis of the various words used
in Chinese to designate literary societies, the main research task will be to
carry out four case studies of four representative societies. These case
studies will analyze the functioning of each society on the basis of its
organization, background, and affiliations. The case studies will provide a
number of relevant categories to be used in a larger general survey of about
50 societies.
On the basis of the understanding acquired of the functioning of literary
societies, some new light will be shed on the structure of the literary field
and the various strategies which were available to writers within that field.
Finally, this new outlook on the literary field will enable us to define key
terms of Chinese literary discourse, such as "literature" (wenxue), more
clearly than before.

Michel Hockx (1964) studied Chinese Language and Literature at Leiden
University, The Netherlands and Liaoning and Beijing Universities, P.R.C.. He
graduated from the Leiden University Sinological Institute in 1987. In 1989
he joined the Leiden University Centre of Non-Western Studies as a PhD
student. From 1993-1994 he was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the Chiang Ching-kuo
Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. He obtained his PhD degree
from Leiden University in April 1994. Publications: Michel Hockx. 'A Snowy
Morning: eight Chinese poets on the road to modernity'. (Leiden: CNWS, 1994).
Michel Hockx. "Wenxue yanjiu hui yu 'wu si' wenxue chuantong" (The Literary
Association of China and the "May Fourth" Literary Tradition), in 'Jintian',
1994:2, pp. 158-168.