Abstract
Modern children’s literature in China has largely been dominated by narratives of the nation and nationalism. The present article sets out to question the dominance of that nationalist stance as the country transitioned into the modern era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining poetic children’s literature, the author unravels distinct non-nationalist intellectual sentiments in competition with the mainstream nationalist discourse that point to an imaginative envisioning of modernity. The article starts with a discussion of children’s poems and school songs imbued with a strong patriotic zeal in the late Qing and early Republican periods, and then moves on to the May Fourth period when lyricism and romanticism drew the attention of children’s literature advocates. Romantic-minded translators and writers, such as Bing Xin, embraced love as a humanist cosmopolitan vision while others, such as Zhou Zuoren and Liu Bannong, turned to local literary heritage, giving rise to a form of children’s songs with strong local consciousness. The article concludes by addressing the relevance of the insights derived from the historical case studies for contemporary children’s literature in China and beyond. It highlights the possibilities of envisaging modernity in non-nationalist terms and stresses the importance of cultivating in children alternative sentiments in the age of rising nationalism, both past and present.
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Notes
A body of research has been devoted to this topic. (Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, for instance, contains two chapters on Chinese children’s literature, both of which address its nation-building function, as the titles indicate: “Childhoods: Childhoods in Chinese Children’s Texts—Continuous Reconfiguration for Political Needs” (Bi and Fang, 2013) and “Imagination: Imaginations of the Nation—Childhood and Children’s Literature in Modern China” (Xu, 2013).
In the early twentieth-century Chinese context, to be modern means above all to be new. While newness itself is a relative term, in this context it refers to an altered conception of time, history and human progress, one that sees history as a unilinear, irreversible and forward moving flow from the past through the present to the future. Leo Ou-fan Lee (1990) discusses this new mode of historical consciousness in depth in his seminal essay “In Search of Modernity.”
Erge is often translated as nursery rhymes, but I use the literal translation of “children’s songs” throughout this article to invoke and stress its folksong aspect, and hence its connection with the wider folk literature movement.
May Fourth refers to the patriotic political mobilizations on 4 May 1919. Scholars’ definitions of the May Fourth Era vary. Its starting point, in addition to 1919, is sometimes placed on 1915, with the initiation of Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine), or 1917, when some intellectuals started advocating political action under the influence of the Russian revolution (the leftist wing). Accordingly, its end is sometimes considered to be 1923 with the outbreak of an important debate on science, or 1925 with the May 30th violence, or 1927 with the outbreak of the so-called White Terror that marked the deep split between the rightists within the Nationalist Party and the burgeoning Communist Party. In the broadest sense, the May Fourth period is sometimes even extended to the year 1936, the eve of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937. In discussing children’s literature in the May Fourth period, Mary Ann Farquhar (1999), for example, refers to the years between 1919 and 1936.
The use of the lyrical here is partly influenced by Jaroslav Průšek’s The Lyrical and the Epic (1980). There, the lyrical is synonymous with “the romantic,” and its stress is on the individual’s liberation from traditional cultural constraints and social structures.
This neglect of new children’s poetry is even true in studies of modern Chinese children’s literature where fairy tales, fables, children’s plays and fiction are believed to have fulfilled the pedagogical-didactic role required by nation-building much better than the lyrical poetic forms.
Unless otherwise specified, translations in this article are my own.
New-style schools emerged as a response to the patriotic Self-Strengthening Movement in the late Qing period, which introduced foreign languages (including English), mathematics, science and technology in order to prepare students for careers that would help facilitate China’s military and industrial development through learning from Western experience. The adoption of Xuetang yuege for new-style schools was an idea first put forward in 1898 by the Reformist leader Kang Youwei, an idea inspired by the Japanese experience. At first, many melodies were taken directly from Japanese and European songs (Zhu, 2014, pp. 83-86).
Ertong shijie was a crucial force behind the Children’s Literature Movement in the 1920s initiated by Wenxue yanjiuhui (Society for literary research), and constitutes editor Zheng Zhenduo’s major contribution to the development of modern children’s literature in China. Zheng served as the editor-in-chief of the journal from the first issue in 1922 until 1923.
This is my own back translation into English from the Chinese translation published in Children’s World (Vol. 1, No. 8).
Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian poet, intellectual and social activist, was a controversial figure among Chinese intellectuals. As the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, he captured the imagination of writers in modern China, especially those inclined towards romanticism. Beyond the sphere of literature, however, attitudes towards Tagore were quite mixed. Anti-traditionalists, Westernizers and pro-Western intellectuals were dissatisfied with Tagore’s eulogy of Chinese (and Eastern) spiritual civilization. Among them, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Wu Zhihui (1865–1953) were perhaps his most vocal opponents.
Fanxing (繁星) was first serialized in Chenbao fukan (Morning supplement) and then published in 1923 by the Commercial Press. A total of 164 poems were included.
The poems for Chunshui (春水) were also serialized first in Morning Supplement; the collection was published in 1923 by Beijing Xinchao. Altogether there were 182 poems.
The translation is quoted from Herbert Batt’s anthology on modern Chinese poetry (forthcoming).
See, for instance, A Ying’s evaluation of Bing Xin’s idea of love (Fan, 1984, p. 205).
In her poems, Bing Xin also values love between siblings. Her Myriad Stars, for example, includes five little poems about a younger brother (2002, pp. 279–324).
The translation is taken from Herbert Batt’s anthology on modern Chinese poetry (forthcoming).
With regard to localism, Zhou made no explicit forays onto the political scene. Rather, he used literature and art to advance his progressive agenda.
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Lisa Chu Shen is a postdoctoral researcher at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Her research focuses on children’s literature in twentieth-century China and its interactions with political and intellectual history. Shen obtained her PhD from Tsinghua University and has published on children’s literature in the early twentieth century. This article is part of a research project funded by the Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Award Number: 2016M601574).
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Shen, L.C. Transcending the Nationalist Conception of Modernity: Poetic Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth-Century China. Child Lit Educ 49, 396–412 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9311-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9311-5