Shen Congwen Among the Chinese Modernists

This is fiction. It can be understood only if read slowly. ... I mean that the language is too obscure not in accord with ordinary usage. Surely you're aware that all thought and behavior not in accord with custom run the risk of being seen as very dangerous, as leading to anarchy!1 This essay argues that there were at least three kinds of literary modernism in mid-twentieth-century China, with Shen Congwen itiiE^t a towering figure of one of them. It is not easy to decide what to call these modernisms. For now, let us call them, in the Chinese context, (1) exterior modernism (from the West and Japan), (2) Shanghai modernism, and (3) academic modernism. China's modernisms were not mere copies of those in the West, or of each other, but creative